Burlington architect Tom Cullins just turned 84 and has pursued painting and photography for nearly all those years. “Tom Cullins: Abstractions,” a retrospective at the Jackson Gallery at Town Hall Theater in Middlebury, includes 59 of his watercolors, mixed-media paintings and photographs. But even that number seems inadequate to explore Cullins’ approach to abstraction — studies in the interplay of color and texture, lines and curves, surface and perspective that nevertheless feel grounded in place.
“I look at something that’s realistic, and something in my mind makes it abstract. I can’t explain it,” Cullins said by phone from the Greek island of Kea, where he and his wife, Kelly, have vacationed every summer for more than 30 years.
While at the architecture and design firm TruexCullins, where he became a senior partner and principal at 33, Cullins shaped much of Burlington’s built environment. (Picture the concrete Cathedral Church of St. Paul, the brick residences at College and Battery streets, and the largely glass IDX Student Life Center at Champlain College, among others.)
In the 1980s, Cullins left Burlington to become chief architect at the IDEA Center, an international architectural firm based in Athens, Greece. His designs from that time include the award-winning Petroline administrative headquarters in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, a minimalist reimagining of mosque-like forms and volumes.
Cullins’ experience in Arab cultures helped him survive when Hezbollah militants hijacked a 1985 flight from Athens on which he was a passenger. He became an effective spokesperson for his group of eight hostages and arrived home safely after 17 days.
Cullins retired from TruexCullins in 2006, giving him more time for his art practice — although art was never an escape from architecture.
It’s “all part of the same process,” Cullins said. He has been painting since age 5, when his mother put a paintbrush in his hand to distract him during an illness. With what he described as his “old-time” Nikon 35-millimeter slide camera, he took photos throughout his career that have won him 18 national awards from the American Institute of Architects.
“Abstractions,” which includes several watercolors of building façades, leaves no doubt as to Cullins’ ability to render scenes and figures in perspective — not surprising for an architect who learned his craft long before computer-aided design took over hand-drafting. Even in these realistic works, however, abstract forms prevail.
“Leunig’s Bistro,” from 2009, shows the downtown Burlington eatery sliced with thin triangles of white sunlight. “Leunig’s,” from the same year, renders the façade and its interior spaces on the same plane in flat, rectangular sections of pink, yellow and gray striped with angled light.
Mediterranean sun and cerulean seas infuse Cullins’ airy, abstract compositions evoking Greece, including watercolors from 2008 to 2009 and 2017 to 2018. (Many of his works have no titles.) In one painting, blocks of variously hued blues and gray-browns are divided by thin lines of exposed white paper, some slanted like sail rigging, while curved blue- and brown-hued forms suggest a domed church, a distant hill or a gently cresting wave.
One mixed-media composition in watercolor and acrylic features three distinct horizontal bands in shades of blue separated by the white of the paper. With diagonal slices of azure and black slashing between them, Cullins creates a progression from roiling seas to a calm, opaque indigo, suggesting a distant rainfall and the onset of night.
Cullins shows a distinct interest in texture in watercolor and acrylic paintings. His drybrush watercolor surfaces evoke the myriad effects of light. A thick dollop of blue acrylic paint accents the center of a painting. The mottled red-brown mixed-media surfaces of “Earth Study” capture the texture of soil.
Likewise, his photographs are so focused on a close study of texture that it’s difficult to tell Cullins has switched mediums. Extreme in their cropping — a group of 13 are mounted on small rectangular panels — the photos are abstract compositions that, after long looking, occasionally resolve into the recognizable: a slice of boat hull, a section of green marble tile, spilled water, chipped paint.
Mediterranean sun and cerulean seas infuse Cullins’ airy, abstract compositions.
A series of watercolors depicting a Barre granite quarry from 2013 presents a naturalistic subject that nonetheless appears geometric and abstract. During one of his four residencies at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, the artist connected with another participant who was photographing the quarry. Cullins brought the artist’s photos to Greece that summer as inspiration for watercolors.
In black, white and shades of brown, each layer and section of cut stone is realistically rendered in finely painted lines. Yet Cullins’ use of light and shadow, water and reflection serve to fool the eye into abstraction. Opaque turquoise water at the base of one quarry wall appears flat; in other works, viewers must puzzle out whether the waterline is a blocky shadow, a translucent layer or a mirror of the cut stone above.
Cullins hasn’t sought out public exhibition opportunities; his last one was at the BCA Center in Burlington in 2014. But Jackson Gallery manager Ellie Friml, herself a tapestry artist, has had a lifelong interest in Cullins’ work and his “designer’s eye for composition.” Her parents, a designer draftsman and a model maker, both worked with TruexCullins.
Architect Rolf Kielman, who joined Truex shortly after Cullins, once called his colleague’s Petroline headquarters a work of “abstract elegance.” No less could be said of his artwork. ➆
“Tom Cullins: Abstractions,” on view through August 8 at the Jackson Gallery at Town Hall Theater in Middlebury.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Out of the Blue | A Middlebury gallery mounts a retrospective of architect Tom Cullins’ paintings and photos”
This article appears in July 22 • 2026.
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