Bones That Crumble: XSULLO’s Anatomical Surrealism

Ask most artists in this series whether they always knew they wanted to be an artist, and the answer is usually no. XSULLO is one of the rare yeses, and he can name the year.

He was eleven. A teacher had spotted him early and moved him into advanced placement, so while other kids were doodling in the margins of worksheets, he was doing printmaking, watercolor, oil painting. Then came the age when classmates start trading answers about what they want to be.

“For sure, I wanna be an artist,” he remembers thinking. “Somehow, some way, I wanna do art.”

For years he swung between two poles. On one side, fan art: Final Fantasy VII, Ghost in the Shell, Dragon Ball Z. On the other, hyperrealism art with a photograph of Jerry Garcia, pushing graphite pencil drawings as close to the photograph as it would go. Even then, he says, he just wanted to make things look as good as possible.

He grew up in the ’90s in a small town outside Humboldt County of Northern California, remote enough that the Milky Way came out on clear nights. The school had a good art program and a great art teacher, and enough of his friends made work that art and soccer practice shared the same week without either one feeling strange.

In his teens his first taste of digital tools came from a neighbor with Photoshop, Maya, and a Wacom tablet on a Macintosh that XSULLO was welcome to tinker with. The neighbor was also growing cannabis at scale in California, years before that was legal. One day the FBI raided the house and sent his neighbor to jail.

“Oh, I guess I’m not going over there anymore to do some art,” he remembers thinking.

He tells it as a joke, and it lands as one. The rest of that childhood was heavier. The upbringing wasn’t always good, and there was family trouble he spent years not dealing with. Friends slid into drug addiction, some of them died. He’s blunt about what leaving meant: had he not moved to San Francisco in 2007, he believes he’d have fallen into the same traps. Art showed up when he needed it most. It was also the way out.

He wanted a fine arts degree. He also ran the numbers on what one actually pays, and pivoted into visual effects instead, a way to keep making images without betting everything on galleries.

Matte painting in the VFX film industry found him more than he found it. In a color and design class, a teacher who moonlighted for Nike and Apple noticed how he kept drifting toward environments and told him to look into it.

“It just kind of clicked,” he says. “It naturally clicked.”

He’d grown up on the Lord of the Rings films, studying the matte painted worlds behind the actors, and years later he found himself sitting beside one of the artists who had painted them. The credits stacked up fast: he worked with a small VFX crew on James Wan’s film Insidious while he was still in school; for the season one finale of Stranger Things, he built snow and painted environments around the scene where Hopper finds Eleven in the woods. On Iron Man 3 he painted aerial views of Key West while bodies fell from a shattered plane overhead.

The work was good, and he’s grateful for it. It also cost him something specific. From 2007 to 2015 he made almost nothing of his own. What personal work existed was demo reel material, and the palette had gone quiet, muted colors, the opposite of everything he’d made as a kid. He describes carrying a festering desire to make his own artwork again.

In 2015 he started making personal work again, a return he describes as coming back to his inner child, coming home to himself. He started to feel more complete.

What came out was a synthesis of everything he’d absorbed: the 90’s anime, the surrealism he’d discovered as a teenager through Giger, Dalí, Escher, and eight years’ worth of pent-up saturation. Cyberpunk happened to be having a revival, and it gave him a container. His own description of the result is a mouthful he laughs at: introspective, anatomical, visceral art.

The bodies are the signature. They crack open, peel, merge with machinery, turn translucent so the light passes through. The method matches. He starts from a 3D blockout or, more recently, an AI-generated composition sketch, then illustrates over it in Photoshop with thick pen brushes.

“I always like to think of it as bashing,” he says. “2D bashing.”

When a piece calls for destruction, he goes at it, breaking the bone structure apart, letting it crumble. When it doesn’t, he draws over the anatomy until it stops being accurate and starts turning abstract.

It’s shedding, he insists, never destruction for its own sake. Get past the surface to the core emotions, then rebuild from there.

“It’s like destruction for the sake of evolving as a human.”

XSullo has been reading Jung’s Red Book, and what he takes from it is a refusal to look away, a commitment to keeping the inward thinking alive when the rat race makes it easy to stay on the surface, to check a bank balance and call that a life. Money, he says, is a tool and nothing more. What everyone is actually doing, in his reading, is trying to understand who they are and where they sit in the world.

Inspiration arrives the way he describes most things: plainly, and a little strangely.

“It feels like you have an antenna attached to your head, and you’re receiving messages from who knows where.”

He sits with the feeling until an image forms, then tries to catch lightning in a bottle before it passes. The deeper material is what the art was always for. He used it to escape his house as a kid, then chose a career that carried him even further away, and eventually he learned what everyone learns.

“That stuff, you can’t just run away from it. It’ll catch up to you.”

By 2015 art had turned therapeutic, a way of peeling himself back to see what was underneath.

“The art can only get you so far, ’cause you have to actually do the work besides make the art.”

Pressed on what the work means, he’s concrete: actual therapy, talking things through, good people in his corner (his wife chief among them, patient and willing to go back and forth), honest self-reflection about his own behavior. What he wants is for his actions to speak louder than his words, or even louder than the art.

In early 2022, two people told him, independently, to make a tarot deck: the artist Praystation, and his wife. He listened.

The deck ran past seventy cards and took more than four years. He went back to the Rider-Waite illustrations of the early 1900s, painted by Pamela Colman Smith, and got pulled in by the composition and the symbology. The fit was obvious once he saw it (tarot works as a set of introspective guideposts, which is what his paintings had been doing all along). Partway through, Manifold and Carte came knocking and built a collecting-card experience around it that bridges web2 and web3.

Nature, first. Get outside, take the walk, talk to the strangers you run into. He notes that Einstein took nature walks and bike rides and came back with his best thinking.

Sleep, second. It lets you reset and hands you a morning with a clear head. Mornings are his best hours for making work, “’cause that’s when you’re the closest to yourself and you’re not being too affected by outside stimulus.”

Third, the basics: a good film, a good show, a good book, other artists living or dead. There’s a lot to learn from all of them.