Todd McCullough, known as Culla (Canadian, b. 1975), makes bleak, largely self-taught paintings and NFT collections that confront the vanity, narcissism and self-help culture of social media.He lives in a rural area outside Toronto, Ontario, and studied art at Sheridan College before briefly attending the Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD).,McCullough began releasing work in the digital space during the COVID-19 pandemic.
He discovered NFTs through a Toronto Star article on young artists finding success minting digital art, and started minting in March of that year.McCullough dropped his first collection, DeeManz, on Kalamint, then moved to Hic et Nunc with V0iDs, a set of 1,000 collectibles conceived as a darker counterpoint to more lighthearted PFP projects.,
In late 2021 he released Basqunks, a collection of 500 that merges the graphic style of Jean-Michel Basquiat with the format of the CryptoPunks.,In 2022 he made a collection on fxhash reimagining Picasso's Guernica in the PFP format, in response to the war in Ukraine.
In his paintings, McCullough works in acrylic, oil stick, paint marker and pencil crayon, building heavily textured images that are increasingly becoming a fusion of text and image, combining words and symbols with bold, expressive brushstrokes. He minted a 2023 collection of these acrylic-and-oil-stick paintings titled born to die.His early influences ranged from John William Waterhouse to Salvador Dalí, Gustav Klimt, illustrator Ralph Steadman and comic art, after a teacher at OCAD encouraged him to paint more intuitively rather than realistically.He showed work in the group exhibition “RAW Artists Canada” in Toronto in 2024.
