Liubóv Szwako: The art makes it for me like that. Everything that I did is cool and if people appreciate it, cool, and if they don't care about it, it's cool. For me, I'm doing it for myself. Like this, it wasn't like "Oh… She's gonna come and I'm gonna do this." I literally just felt like painting. That's what I do. I sit down and I play music and sometimes I smoke a little bit, and I just go at it. I like to see, if I do this, what's going to happen. If I do that, what.

For me, selling my work is hard, not because I don't want to get rid of it, but because I want people who appreciate it for what it is. I just want people to appreciate it as much as I appreciate it… to me it's not a product. It's just something that I did and I really don't hold onto it, like, I don't have super connected feelings to it —I just want it to go to places where it's appreciated as much as I appreciated making it. If there would be a way for me to give art for free and just get paid somehow, I would do that, to people that care, but unfortunately in the world that we live in you need to make money in order to do things.

Tone Madison: You mentioned Stefan Matioc. How did that relationship come to be? Was interacting with him the catalyst for you to put your work out to the public in various ways?

Liubóv Szwako: The reason why I put the work out to the public is because I wanted to share what I do. Honestly, when I started I just wanted to see what people thought about it. It was about getting feedback. Believe it or not, yeah it might be nice to see, "Oh, I have this many likes." But to me it's not about having likes on social media. It's not like I'm taking selfies of my stuff or with me. It's not for my ego. I just want to show my work and see how people react to it. Some people like certain things and some people like other things. Some people don't like any and some people like all of it. I like to see how people react to what I do but it doesn't really change what I do. It doesn't affect the work that I do, or it doesn't make me do more of what's popular. I literally do what I want to do all the time.

Meeting Stefan was the kick of confidence that I needed for me to give it a shot. I met him because I started working at Lucille and there was a mural of his there in the basement. I liked his work and I messaged him on Instagram and I was like, "Yo, I like your work. Would you do something on my walls?" He was like, "I'm in Mexico but when I come back, sure." I was like, "Well, if you're in Mexico and you need anything, I was born and raised there and I know a lot of people there. I can hook you up with anything." And when he came back to the US we met up and he sat exactly where you're sitting and we just talked about life. And we just talked about each others' opinions and perspectives and I just realized this guy has done a lot of cool work. He's down to earth and he's down to meet up and just have a conversation. It just made it a little bit more real for me that you can actually make this a career. I get a lot of inspiration from him and he was a very good mentor.

After he left that night I actually woke up from dead sleep in the middle of the night at like 4:30 in the morning. I never wake up in the middle of the night ever, like, even for the bathroom. I just sleep through the night. And I literally woke up at 4:30 in the morning. I remember it was really windy because there was a big branch outside of the door, like a five-foot branch. I came out and I had a spray paint that's like chalk, so you can spray paint and then wash it off. I was like "I need to spray something. I feel like I want to spray paint something." So I went outside and I did a triangle shape on the driveway. I didn't plan on it; I just drew something and it was a triangle so I just kept doing triangles over and over and the next thing you know I had a big chunk of the driveway painted with triangles. It felt good. I went back to bed and I woke up that morning and I went in the store and I was like "What's the biggest, cheapest piece of foamboard that I can buy?" So I taped it up and did triangles on it with a bunch of different spray paint. I fit it in here, and it was the first time I spray painted in here—no mask, no nothing. It was a good learning experience, for sure. And then Stefan came by later that day and he's like "Yo, that looks super cool," so he helped me take the tape off. And it's been an ongoing piece, like, every time he comes by he adds something to it so it's a cool little ah… I've never shown that piece and it's been on that wall basically since I did it. That's kind of my relationship with him and it's just an inspiration. I don't think he showed me how to do anything. I think that he just gave me the confidence and I learned from him—like "hey, he's doing this, he does this," and again, any questions that I had, I reached out to him and he was kind enough to, you know… and now we have a really good relationship.