Art Rebel Wants You to Color Outside the Lines

Ponti, the artist-entrepreneur behind Art Rebel, is clear about his mission: create, celebrate, educate.

The business on the second floor of a Ventura Boulevard office building holds the usual art classes for kids. But Ponti also uses art to produce “Underground Dinners” at which guest chefs explain their dishes and diners paint between courses. He holds corporate retreats to encourage employees to break out of their business restraints. He creates art sessions for couples with champagne and paint brushes. And he takes his art events to shopping centers, senior centers and youth nonprofits.

“Outside it’s a conveyor belt,” he explained as he sat in the party room he created for his business. “When people come in here, it’s a pause. ... We’re a healing studio disguised as an art studio.”

The 5-year-old business evolved after Ponti had what he called “light bulb” moments about the role of art in his life and how it could fit into others'.

A Los Angeles native, he was encouraged as a child by his grandmother to paint, and won a painting competition at age 3. As an adult, he left art behind to become an investment banker in London, a job that left him feeling unfulfilled. On a visit to his fiancée in Chicago, who was an artist herself, he asked if he could paint on one of her easels. After two solid days of energetic painting, he realized he should paint—that was his first light bulb, he said.

Moving back to Los Angeles, he became a full-time painter with gallery shows and sales to celebrities like Benicio Del Toro, Sean Penn and Paris Hilton. Because he painted into the wee hours of the morning, partying friends followed him to his studio and found themselves painting beside him. At times, as many as 60 people filled his studio, he said. 

That experience led to the second light bulb moment, when a homicide detective told him he sought solace in alcohol from his grisly job. Ponti suggested the detective paint instead, and presented him with a giant, blank canvas. The detective began with timid brush strokes but ended up shouting and flinging paint at the canvas. Afterward, he told Ponti he enjoyed the best night’s sleep he'd had in 25 years.

The experience led Ponti to reconsider his life as an artist.

“Maybe it wasn’t about me being a successful artist,” he said. “Maybe it was about being of service to others to help them reconnect with their creative selves.”

Thus, Art Rebel was born. Together, Ponti and his wife, Sabine Abadou, run the business. They provide a variety of art experiences, including birthday parties with art in his party room; art experiences for children at various Westfield shopping malls, including Fashion Square; zen art sessions with art as a stress reliever; and the corporate art sessions with as many as 350 people at a time, which are held in New York, Montreal and other locales.

Ponti now wants to take art healing further and collaborate with nonprofits to hold programs like the Dec. 17 event in Exposition Park in which 1,000 foster children with disabilities will tour three museums and engage in art activities.

“We want to work with at-risk kids and juvenile detention centers and get kids off the street,” Ponti said, adding that a nonprofit could be in his future.

Art Rebel, 14382 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks; artrebel.net.