Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, and more big names endorse "Jacob Reed And Me"
The Artist
S1 Ep. 1 Feb 25, 2026

The Artist

On a hunt for graphic design jobs after a career setback, Jacob’s internet searches lead him to Sea Breeze II, a generic painting signed by Jacob Reed. This discovery launches an unexpected quest to crack the code of artistic success. Along the way, Jacob wades through the jungle of customer service hotlines, uncovers the costume jewelry capital of North America, and finds wisdom from a stranger in the most unexpected corner of the globe.

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If you’ve ever stayed in a hotel and stared blankly at the art above the bed — you know the kind. Serene. Inoffensive. A beach somewhere, curtains billowing, turquoise water just out of reach — there’s a decent chance you’ve encountered the work of Jacob Reed.

Not this Jacob Reed (me, the host of this show). The other one.

I’m a writer, director, and artist from Southern California. I have a common name, and I get emails, wrong numbers, and all kinds of other correspondence for other people named Jacob Reed. Years ago, I started a spreadsheet. It’s full of other Jacob Reeds. And during the pandemic, when the entertainment industry shut down… I found myself sneaking out to my garage each night after putting our baby to sleep; that spreadsheet became an obsession — a portal to hundreds of alternate lives, one for every fork in the road I hadn’t taken.

When the entertainment industry shut down, I Googled “Jacob Reed” and “artist” — hoping to dust off an old portfolio for some freelance work. Instead, I found a painting called Sea Breeze II:

Sea Breeze II is, to put it plainly, hotel art. A tropical cabana view, billowing white fabric, palm trees, sand, water. The kind of thing you’d find at HomeGoods, wedged between a canvas print of the Brooklyn Bridge and a wooden sign that says It’s Wine O’Clock Somewhere. And yet the reviews are rapturous. People love this painting. It makes them feel like they’re on vacation. It makes them feel warm.

“It is breathtaking! Beautiful colors, and it feels like you are actually there!”

As someone who has spent his career making things for a living — I read those reviews and felt something unexpected: a little humbled. So, I decided to get to the bottom of it.

The hunt for the artist behind Sea Breeze II turned out to be a lot harder than expected. The painting is sold by hundreds of retailers — Wayfair, Walmart, Target, Z Gallerie — but almost none of them have any idea who painted it. I called them all.

What followed was a labyrinthine hell of automated customer service: hold music, callback systems that put you back on hold, voice recognition bots that repeated any of my old orders back to me, and customer reps who were very sorry but did not have that information and could not give it out and also didn’t have it in the first place.

One rep — trying to be helpful — Googled “Jacob Reed.”

“He has written and directed for Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, and Funny or Die.”

“That one is me.”

“Oh. Are you the one who painted that?”

The dead ends started to feel personal. Which maybe they were — because I knew something about putting your creative work out into the world and watching something else blow up instead.

Back in 2015, I was working two tracks at once. My day job was at BuzzFeed, in the early days of their video department — he was there for the Try Guys, the blue dress/gold dress, all of it. As part of my training, I made a taste test video. “Americans Try Japanese Soda.” We shot this video so quickly, I didn’t notice it was slightly out of focus until it was already uploaded.

At the same time, for a full year in my evenings and weekends, I and a crew of filmmakers and animators had been building something he actually cared about: a pilot for a web series called Before You Were Funny, where comedians performed their oldest, worst material live on stage. Stop motion. Big guests. Every favor called in.

Both went live the same week. The artistic labor of love accumulated a few thousand views. The slightly-out-of-focus soda video hit two million overnight.

I wondered if the Jacob Reed who painted of Sea Breeze II knew the feeling. Maybe it was his version of Japanese Soda, and his real art was something else.

The closest thing to a breakthrough came from Wayfair, where a rep named Kylie pointed him to a contact form for a company called Stupell Industries Limited Incorporated. A few days later, a man named Todd Stupell called back.

Todd runs a family business out of Rhode Island that has — over nearly half a century — imported and exported costume jewelry, home goods, and eventually wall art. (“Providence, Rhode Island was actually the costume jewelry capital of the world 50-60 years ago.”) He didn’t know the artist personally (“We have a million pieces of art”), but he offered to help, and he came through: the painting had been licensed through a company called C Brand Studios, formerly known as Top Art.

Before I could get anywhere with Top Art, Todd introduced me to someone who could at least explain why Sea Breeze II existed: Susanne Stahley, an art director with a PhD in art history from Brown, who’d spent years as a buyer for TJX (parent company of TJ Maxx, Marshalls, and HomeGoods), traveling the world and assembling collections of art to sell in stores.

Susanne’s take on the painting reframed everything. The cabana view, the billowing drapes, the turquoise water — these aren’t accidents. They’re an invitation. The vantage point puts you just outside the frame, feet on the deck, about to step into an unreal paradise. It’s a daydream, engineered. And right now, a lovely daydream is something people could really use.

Suddenly, I got why people loved this painting. And I felt like a snob for dismissing it.

Meanwhile, Top Art turned out to have an Italian connection. C Brand Studios was formerly Top Art LLC — and before that, there was a European partner: Top Art SRL, based in Milan.

Finding them required a small act of creative archaeology. I remembered from an old freelance gig — doing work for comedian Stan Freberg‘s company, Freberg LTD — that British companies use LTDs instead of LLCs. I wondered if Italy uses their own acronym and discovered Società a responsabilità limitata, or SRL. When I searched “Top Art SRL,” up came a shipping manifest: 270 kilograms of posters and catalogs, shipped from the Port of Genoa to the Port of Los Angeles, from Top Art SRL to Top Art LLC.

And on the other end of that paper trail: Mauro Torre.

Mauro is in his mid-fifties, with kind eyes and thick wavy hair — an Italian Kevin Kline. He’s been in the publishing business his whole life; his father and uncle started Top Art in Milan in 1974, and Mauro joined after university, eventually opening a US office in California in 1990. He didn’t paint, but he had an eye for what would sell. Sometimes he licensed existing art; sometimes he commissioned pieces from a small studio of freelance artists, giving them direction on subject, feeling, atmosphere.

I sent Mauro the link to Sea Breeze II over Zoom.

Mauro studied the image. Then: “This has been created from one artist — and also the name of the artist has been created.”

Mauro explained that Jacob Reed the Artist is not a real person. The name was invented — part of the marketing. An American-sounding name for a painting designed to help it sell in an international market. Mauro’s process: find a first and last name with a nice, important sound when you put them together. Short. Easy to remember.

“So, to you, the name Jacob Reed sounds important.”

“Yeah. At the time. Yes.”

“Not anymore?”

“No, of course. Yes. Obviously.”

The question I’d been circling the whole episode — am I Jacob Reed, the artist? — turned out to have a weirder answer than I could have ever expected. The “Jacob Reed” I’d been chasing was never a person at all. He was a brand. A made-up name attached to a made-up history, designed to move merchandise. The complete inverse of everything I had imagined about what an artist should be.

And yet.

When I pressed Mauro on the art-vs-commerce tension — the thing he’d been wrestling with his whole career — Mauro didn’t hesitate: “With the poetry, you don’t eat.” He invoked Phil Collins, who started in progressive rock and made his real money going soft. He didn’t say it with contempt. Just pragmatism. It’s business.

One of my favorite shows is White Lotus. A short time after talking with Mauro, I came across an article about how White Lotus was made. Facing pandemic production delays, HBO needed content fast. They called Mike White — who had a reputation with the network for being reliable and fast — and asked if he could write something COVID-friendly: single location, quick turnaround. One of the most acclaimed shows of recent years was, at its origin, a supply chain solution.

Sometimes we make art. Sometimes we make wall art. Often, we don’t get to pick.

After everything — the phone trees, the dead ends, the shipping manifests, the Italian publishing house — Jacob and Mauro eventually met in person. Mauro visited California. They got a photo. Mauro picked up the check.

“Hopefully it’s gonna be a success for you, and I hope it’s gonna sell.”

“Yes. That’s the hope.”

Jacob Reed and Me releases new episodes every Wednesday. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Support the show and get early episodes at Patreon.

And if you want to own your own Sea Breeze II — the real one, the fake one, the only one — iCanvas has you covered. (Affiliate link. An empty wall is not nice.)