New member work on view at Artists’ Association
BY LAURA RASKIN INDEPENDENT ARTS WRITER

The photographry of new AAN member Taylor Cullen will be part of an exhibition opening this Friday

The cheese and grape platters on Old South Wharf no longer overflow like it’s a party in

the hills of Tuscany. The wine no longer chugs from bottles like a hose. The French doors of local galleries stay shut more often, now that it is nippier.

But art lovers and gallery opening fiends have a few last chances before Christmas to pretend it is still summer. The Artists’ Association gallery on Washington Street continues with its regular openings, the next and 13th of the season on Friday, Oct. 28, from 6 to 8 p.m.

The show features a variety of work by longtime AAN members including Kathleen Kelliher, George Thomas, Jerry Carl, Jeannette Carl, Peter Guarino and Helen Sharp Potter in addition to work by some new artist members including John Curran, Lauri Robertson, Wendy Stone, Ed Rudd, Nell Van Vorst and Kevin Stanton. Many media will be represented including painting, drawing, pastel, sculpture, photography, jewelry and textile art.

New AAN member and exhibitor, Taylor Cullen, blended in with the merchandise at Marina Clothing Co. where she was working on Old South Wharf last week, with her lime green cashmere sweater and strawberry blond hair in the midst of all those citrus-hued men’s ties.

The 23-year-old has been visiting her grandmother in Nantucket since she was a child, but has made the island her permanent home since the beginning of the summer, even if her license plate still says “Live Free or Die.”

Cullen graduated in the spring from the New England School of Photography in Boston. She majored in black and white and minored in digital, a somber acceptance that it is the way of the future.

“Kodak has already stopped making black and white paper,” Cullen bemoaned, if bemoaning is possible from an enthusiastic fast-talker. She looked at her sneakers, Kelly green, as she headed to town for lunch and a break from her job as a clerk at the clothing store.

Growing up in New Hampshire, Cullen went to a creative grade school, as she described it, where every year the children chose what they wanted to study. Her twin brother opted for photography one year — their father’s passion — and Cullen went to work in the kitchen.

She was quickly envious of her brother and stole her father’s camera equipment from him as often as she could. She still has her dad’s old Nikon F2A and works around the fact that the light meter is broken.

Although she admits his work has entered the realm of calendar cliché, her hero is Ansel Adams, as is his protégé John Sexton. Cullen ventures into the woods and natural environments to shoot large with a Shen Hao camera made to order in China. Resembling a 19th century studio camera, Cullen gushed over its portability and old-fashioned feel.

Lately she has been experimenting with printing negatives on paper that is only sensitive to UV light, creating an antiqued patina look.

Cullen decided that remaining on the island for a year would ease a busy schedule that has not allowed her to figure out her preferred medium. She makes glass beads and is teaching ceramics at the AAN this year. “To find me,” she said, is the reason she will stick around.

Exhibition 13 of the Artists’ Association opens Friday, Oct. 28, from 6 to 8 p.m. at 19 Washington St.

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