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§ Welcome
Half real,
half made up,
painted the way I think they should be.
I paint in acrylic and watercolour: birds fitted with the airframes of real aircraft, villages along Route 62, and the occasional impossible thing. Some of it is invented carefully, like a blueprint. Some of it is just what I noticed and wanted to keep.
This is a place to look slowly. Wander a series, read the story behind a piece, or just let the colour do the talking.
Start looking →§ 01 — Aeromechanica
From the WWII air wars, fought by aeromechanica insects to modern commercial jets powered by cocoa.
Creatures fitted with the airframes of real aircraft. Some carry RAF roundels, some Luftwaffe Balkenkreuze. A small war fought by birds, beetles, mosquitos, robber flies and hornets. A commercial, passenger-carrying, biomechanical plane, using large language models. Half engineering, half nonsense, all impractical.
The flagship — cocoa-powered, whale-sized
Aeromechanica Musculus
Acryla Gouache · Canvas · 2026
The flagship. A double-decker behemoth of the skies, wingspan and body length sized well past anything sensible, and built to carry five hundred people or more. Cocoa-powered, like its sister the Avis Aeromechanica Chocolatus, and a cleaner way to fly for it. I designed it with whales in mind. Picture the engineering it takes to get a blue whale off the ground and keep it there. Here it works the fog over Aeroville, climbing out and setting down at once, the metropolis dissolving underneath and the mountains holding the horizon behind.
FlightGPT — a bird brain and language model, coupled
FlightGPT
A3 · Watercolour · Paper · 2026
A bird brain and language model combination, designed to power a biomechanical aircraft. The senses feed a perception builder, the language model mixes reality against the flight plan, and the physical controls translate it all into wings, cabin and fuel.
The drawings — origin, airframe, cockpit
Aeromechanica (side profile)
A4 · Watercolour · Hot Press · 2025
Side elevation. ILS trees on either side of the runway. Annotated for free flight, slurp, smoothie and feed.
Aeromechanica (top profile)
A3 · Watercolour · Hot Press · 2025
Top elevation. The high-nutrition bypass propulsion engine, with mixer, microwave and CO2 extractor.
Aeromechanica Chocolatus Airframe Cutaway
A3 · Ink, Pastel & Watercolour · 2026
A cutaway of the airframe. The structure follows a bird's rib strategy, with the wings mounted to the airframe and driven by the Flaperon Engine. Fuel is carried in bags. The Dove Tail keeps the flight stable.
Aeromechanica Chocolatus Cockpit
A3 · Watercolour & Ink · Paper · 2026
The control panel of the Chocolatus. Emergency feeding draws from the seed and cacao reserves. The bird brain, the FlightGPT LLM and Foodec are all marshalled from here.
The squadron — allied, axis, jet age
Lucanus Aeromechanica Avronis
A4 · Watercolour · Vellum · 2026
A stag beetle on the airframe of an Avro. Mandibles up, RAF roundels, bombs slung beneath.
Culex Aeromechanica De Havillandii
A4 · Watercolour · Vellum · 2026
A mosquito turned De Havilland Mosquito. Two Merlins, three crew, RAF roundels.
Libellula Aviatica
Acryla Gouache · Canvas · 2026
A dragonfly given the airframe of a biplane. Two pairs of wings, a twin tail, RAF roundels.
Promachus Aeromechanicus Crucifer
A4 · Watercolour · Vellum · 2026
A robber fly with cruciform wings and Balkenkreuze. Predator built like a fighter.
Vespa Aeromechanica Crabro
A4 · Watercolour · Vellum · 2026
A hornet on a Bf 109 nose. Six legs, Luftwaffe markings, fuselage 13.
Avis Aeromechanica Promachus
A4 · Watercolour · Vellum · 2026
A second robber fly, teal and ochre this time. Same Raubfliege nickname in the title box, same crosses on the wings.
Avis Aeromechanica Paciferus
A4 · Watercolour · Vellum · 2026
A bird with swept gull wings and a 27.642m span. Mach 2.64, crew of one, armed with rotten eggs.
The album — where the company history gives itself away
Aeromechanica Chocolatus Evolution
A3 · Watercolour & Ink · Paper · 2026
Four panels held down with purple photo corners, like a page lifted out of an album. 1972: a boy in a field throwing a paper aeroplane at a house. 1976: an aircraft built out of toy bricks. 1985: a remote control model over a field. 2026: the Chocolatus over the lighthouse, in miniature, at the end of its own family album. The drawing office was never real. This is where the work actually came from.
§ 02 — Rurban
Buildings, hills, and the occasional tree.
Scenes reduced to what I actually noticed. Route 62 country, the harbours of False Bay, and a few places further afield that asked to be painted.
The Road to Somewhere (Part One)
1000 × 750 mm · Canvas · 2026
Reimagining the R62. Sometimes on life's journey we reach a destination that brings joy, abundant fruit, colour, a beautiful house at the end of the road. The journey to Know Where is not over, but this is a good stopping point.
Cantabrian Mountains
1000 × 750 mm · Canvas · 2026
A rural farm setting near Espinosa de los Monteros. One of the best places I have been on holiday.
Suurbraak
1000 × 750 mm · Canvas · 2024
A charming village near Swellendam.
The Last Holiday, Amsterdam
1000 × 750 mm · Canvas · 2025
Overlooking the Grote Die in Amsterdam Noord. A lot of small but interesting things to see, if you look for them.
Siloed Reflections
A2 · Acryla Gouache · Canvas Board · 2026
A take on the Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town. The grain silos were cut open and glazed, and the curved wall of glass now holds the sky, the clouds and the ochre building across the square. The facade shows you everything except itself, which felt like the honest way to paint a silo that became a gallery.
Watercolours on paper
St James
A3 · Watercolour · 2025
Bo-Kaap
A3 · Watercolour · 2025
Montagu
A3 · Watercolour · 2025
Robertsvlei
A3 · Watercolour · 2026
Paternoster
A3 · Watercolour · 2026
Above Paternoster
A3 · Watercolour · 2026
§ 03 — Parareal
Real to someone. Just not the version you expected.
A reality running parallel to the ordinary one, and no less real to the person inside it. Nothing here is wrong. It is only seen from a different seat. I see a phone; someone else sees a listening device, and they are not mistaken. I see the Guggenheim; they see the art come alive. The same world, read differently.
A Starling's Reformation at Five to Midnight
750 × 1000 mm · Acryla Gouache · Canvas · 2026
A reflection on the way nature can take from us, often without warning, even the things we value most. No authority, influence or urgency can reclaim what has been lost once time begins to run out. To me it is about universal reckoning, and the limits of human control.
Bilbao, Guggenheim Museum
750 × 1000 mm · Acryla Gouache · Canvas · 2025
Elevating the titanium-clad building and its art to new levels.
The Grand Insect Hotel
750 × 1000 mm · Acryla Gouache · Canvas · 2026
The official painting commemorating The Insect Hotel.
The Path
1000 × 750 mm · Acryla Gouache · Canvas · 2025
A path to the Moon.
Watercolours on paper
Sir Real
A3 · Watercolour · 2025
Eye Field
A3 · Watercolour · 2025
Listening
A3 · Watercolour · 2025
The Reckoning — a set of three
A bill arrives at the end of days of helpfulness. Someone at the table can pay it, but paying and contributing are not the same thing. The others carry on consuming while the debt sits there in play, and it does not occur to them to help. To me the story says Judas has his thirty pieces of silver. Jesus gets the bill for his good works, the devil has handed it over and is now waiting. Judas could pay, and possibly save him. Everyone else is looking on, or looking in, wondering what to do. The same reckoning is staged twice more in a shawarma shop, and the writing runs backwards in all three, because this is the version you get when you look at it from the other side.
The Reckoning
A3 · Watercolour · 2026
The Reckoning 2
A3 · Watercolour · 2026
The Reckoning 3
A3 · Watercolour · 2026
§ More to see
This is a selection. There is more.
The villages and harbours, the Parareal pieces and the portraits, the watercolours that did not fit above. The full collection lives on its own page.
Browse the full collection →§ About Jono
I draw before I paint (a blueprint, a cutaway, an annotation), and then I let the colour break the rules the drawing set.
I work in acrylic, Holbein Acryla Gouache and watercolour. Mostly the Western Cape: the villages along Route 62, the harbours after rain, the light on a hillside. Every piece is a physical object, real paint on real canvas or paper, and none of it is AI-generated.
I also write. The essays have nothing to do with painting: governance, technology, and how institutions hold together or fail to.
Originals & prints
Most pieces are available as originals or prints. There is no pressure to buy. If something here speaks to you, send a message and we can talk about it.
Enquire about a piece →