About
I'm Jono. I paint because the real world is more interesting than anything I could invent, and because it looks better when you stop being faithful to it.
I work from observation. Landscapes, buildings, people, insects: things I have actually seen and stood in front of. The painting starts there and then departs. Colours shift. Elements migrate from other places, other days. What arrives on the canvas is a composite of experience, not a copy of a single moment.
The surrealism is intentional but not decorative. I am drawn to naive art as a discipline, not a limitation. Flat colour, visible construction, the refusal to hide the hand behind the image. Holbein Acryla Gouache gives me the saturation and opacity to work this way. When I need something looser, Mungyo watercolours.
Every painting on this site is a physical object. Real acrylic on real canvas, real watercolour on real paper. None of the images are AI-generated. I get asked, so it is worth saying plainly. If you want the longer version of how AI does and does not figure into my process, I wrote about it in Painting with a Critic.
The intent is to keep exploring the real world and to apply surrealistic views where the scene asks for it. Not as a style imposed from outside, but as something that emerges when you look at a place long enough and honestly enough. The kitchen really does have a black hole in it. The insect hotel really is that grand. The bird plane was always there in the blueprints.
I have no formal training. I learned by doing things wrong until they started looking right. The upside is that nobody told me what I was not supposed to try.
The essays on this site are not about art. They are about things I care enough to write down: governance, technology, how institutions work or fail to. They are here because this is my site and these things matter to me.
Elsewhere on the web:
The Insect Hotel, my other creative playground.
Ai Runtime Security, my professional work in security.