Hello.

Did you art all over your play button? That's awesome.

Good morning, John. While I was in Los Angeles, I found myself near Sara Sandoval's house. Sara is an artist. Back in 2016, she made over 100 individual unique t-shirts for the Perfect Strangers tour. And they were awesome, and we sold all of them. And if you still have one, please post a picture somewhere. I would love to see them.

I love Sara's work, and it was kind of a fan moment to see this, like amazing little jam packed garage studio space where a lot of the work comes from. And then I also got a tour of the inside of her house to find so much of her art on the walls. She told me she doesn't really want it there since they're harder to sell since social media algorithms changed and stopped featuring her work as much. We only had, like, an hour to hang out, so we hatched a little plan.

She busted open two canvases and then started building some layers for a background on the first one. Sara's immigration status can make some kinds of work complicated for her, but with a mix of mural work and commissions and tattoos, it's a lot of different things. She's making it work in Los Angeles. The stuff that she was making on YouTube when I first discovered her, it was pretty celebrity driven, in part because that's what was getting clicks. During the pandemic, though, she started to take her work in more political directions. And I've absolutely loved seeing her work change perspective and medium and intent. My favorites are her cute little inklings and also her more Aztec inspired work. Then I took on my canvas.

I've been doing, like, a fair amount of spray painting for Project for Awesome stuff over the last few years. I just, like, smack down 20 canvases, and then I build layers to see what happens. I find spray paint such, like, a good medium for me, because with a lot of what I do, it's very easy to iterate super fast. So many accidents happen, but when you're already onto the next thing, an accident feels more like inspiration than, like, failure.

And with that ethos behind me, I was very happy to see that the thing I was making in Sara's studio actually start to look kind of good. Like, at least not embarrassing. And then there was the core of the idea, the swap. I took her canvas and she took mine, and we arted on each other's art. Sara made one of her skulls on mine, which ended up looking totally dope. And I only know how to do one thing. So Sara's canvas, got a hanklerfish and look at this. Less than an hour and we had made a thing together.

This was, like, bizarrely dreamy for me because I did so much on my trip to Los Angeles, but most of it, there was a lot of layers to make it happen, whereas this was very pure and simple. I don't ever think of myself as an artist. Like, I don't know, maybe I should. But I do love it when two artists make a thing together. And I guess I feel like I got to be one of those artists for a moment. I loved seeing Sara work in real time.

Her stuff is such an interesting mix of the slow, focused, laborious work of cutting paper and then the fast but still finicky work of spray paints. Her cut paper pieces are especially striking close up. After I left, I texted Sara and I told her that I thought she should get her store back online because I felt like people would like her stuff if they knew that it existed. And so she got it up in record time. It is on the Internet now. You can check out her work at sarasandoval.com. I bet there's a link in the description.

I think her art falls nicely into that place where it's definitely, like good art from a working artist. But also it is not so expensive as to be out of reach for everybody. Also, we are selling the things that we made and the money from that is going to go into the Project for Awesome fund.

What an absolute delight. Thank you, Sara. And thank you Kathy for the camera work.

John, I'll see you on Tuesday. There's anglerfish on the wall. An anglerfish over there.