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OGDEN — The owner of Pandemonium Art Gallery embraces mistakes.
"If you make a mistake, then you know what not to do," Jane Font said. "You have an opportunity to try and fix it, and to learn from that mistake."
Some would call the art in her gallery nontraditional, or even weird, but Font doesn't agree. Her art is fundamentally subjective, and although the paintings she displays may be a bit odd, it all depends on your point of view, she said.
She has also found a nontraditional way to share her art with others.
"I think traditional is kind of an abstract concept," Font said. "Everybody has a different idea of what traditional is."
Font's current favorite piece of art in her gallery features an octopus and a Dr. Seussian-type fish playing volleyball with a sea mine.
She spent her childhood days surrounded by reminders of the talent she thought she never had. Seeing a wide variety of art come through her doors affected Font in ways she never expected.
"My mom and my grandfather were artists, so I always wanted to be," she said. "I wasn't good at it, because I guess I just didn't do it very often."
Not attempting to create art herself was a mistake, Font said, a mistake she eventually turned into an opportunity.
"During the week, I would have lots and lots of free time," she said. "Rather than just kind of sitting here doing nothing, I decided 'Well, I'll just start painting something.'"
It wasn't easy at first, but Font had help.
"There's paint tutorials online (and) I have a lot of artist friends, so I was able to ask questions," she said. "Once you get a little bit of experience, if you start really looking at art and kind of analyzing what was done, you can a lot of times tell what techniques were used."
After a lot of practice and more than her fair share of mistakes, the student became the teacher — while also remaining a student herself.
Font began hosting "painting parties" at her gallery, leading groups of people and showing them how to paint particular pieces of art.
"One of the best ways to learn how to do something is to teach someone else how to do it," Font said.
While those parties helped Font earn some extra income, she's decided to leave it behind. She's even found someone to take over the gallery — not because it's a failure, but because she's an online success.
"I'm going to be doing my YouTube channel full time," she said. "Right now I put out one video a week and all week long I work on that one video. Once I'm able to devote 100 percent of my time to it. It's possible I'll be able to put out two videos a week."
The idea of uploading painting tutorials to YouTube sprung from the canvas of her painting parties.
"I put it up there, and just kind of forgot about it," Font said referring to one of her painting tutorial videos on YouTube. "And then about a month or so later, I thought, 'Oh, maybe I'll go check on that, see how that's doing,' and it had like a thousand views, and that was kind of surprising to me."
Her videos quickly became more involved and a bit of a breakthrough came when she won a contest called "YouTube NextUp." She visited the YouTube offices, where experts taught her how to improve her videos with techniques like lighting and better microphones.
Now, she has a regular group of viewers around the world. While the biggest supporters of her channel and website, Painting with Jane, are from the United States and Canada, Font finds a lot of her views come from surprising locations.
"My third highest demographic is India," she said. "And I'm starting to get a lot of views in the Middle East."
Font's managed to launch her own brand of paintbrushes, and even has a group of her loyal followers traveling to Utah to paint alongside her in person.
She credits part of her progress to consistency and posting on the same day each week. She also tries to help newcomers by telling them to learn to love their mistakes.
"I tell people in my videos that every time they make a mistake that it's an opportunity to learn something new," Font said.
She spends all week preparing for her next video, making those mistakes herself. Font has a stack of what she calls "practice canvases," which she paints over and over again. She makes no attempt to hide this fact because she wants her viewers to know that mistakes can be a good thing. Mistakes are just an opportunity to learn, Font said.
"If you have that mentality, then I think that there's nothing you can't do," she said.
