Erica Arndts

Erica Arndts paints murals four stories up and portraits at home, starting at 4:30 in the morning.

She and Brad Banyas had talked once before, deep into politics, and he opened the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast saying he felt like he already knew her. She turned up without her dog George, a lab who greets people by peeing on their shoes, and agreed that all the studio equipment made that the right call. Banyas had been showing his kids her Chipper Jones portrait. Both of them are Atlanta people, and she has now looped back to Georgia three times.

She drew as a kid and went to school for fine art, which she hated, four hours a day drawing vases. Fashion design came next. She moved to Los Angeles for three years and spent them designing leather jackets for rock musicians, Alice Cooper among them. When she paints now she works one thing at a time, up at 4:30, coffee, workout, then paint all day with an audiobook running. The Braves portraits took about three full days each. She sends work in progress to her parents because they are not artists and will tell her the ear is wrong when she was worried about the pinky finger. Murals are the other half of it. She likes the machinery and the height and the people who stop to ask questions, and she puts her name on the wall large enough to read.

In 2008 the fashion industry stopped hiring, so she moved to Georgia and became a physician recruiter. The money was good and she was miserable, painting on the side for years, her sisters' kids' rooms first, then whatever Instagram would carry, until there was enough work to quit. Last year cost her more. She painted a portrait of Trump the night of the attempt on his life, having never been political and having just voted for the first time in her life, and it raised hell on every platform. A dance studio in Atlanta whose mural she had painted eight years earlier asked the community to fund painting over it. The woman who hired her for that job was an old friend from the recruiting days. Arndts reached out and got no answer. She lost friends over it. She also got a lot of work out of it.

Her advice to an 18 year old heading for art school is to skip it. She came out of four years with an associate's degree and $150,000 in student loans, and she tells people to paint their own walls, paint over them, start again, and offer a first mural to somebody for free. She has not owned a TV in seven years. She drove to Montana alone after Yellowstone hooked her, slept in her car for two weeks, and did not paint once the whole time. Her sign off was stay groovy and carry on.