Jono Dry
Jono Dry is a South African artist who was born in Pretoria and raised in Cape Town. He is entirely self-taught and only works in graphite pencil, on paper or board.
He spends on average over 300 hours on one art piece, to ensure that the photorealism of his artwork completely overwhelms his viewer
by Shannan Goetsch
Dry’s artwork is a mixture of realism and surrealism. This means that his artworks are photorealistic, but they have elements of fantasy and make belief which pulls his artwork more into the surrealism spectrum. He likes to push the boundaries and forces the person viewing his art to embrace his subtle changes. He aims to “broaden the viewer’s perception of the ordinary” ("Jono Dry Biography - Rossouw Modern", 2018). His art is so realistic and lifelike that it allows the person to think that the character in the picture does have horns growing out of his or her head. It does not seem like a drawing but rather like a photograph. This embodies the concept of realism perfectly, tricking the human mind into thinking that what they are seeing is real, instead of a drawing.
Dry takes his time in creating the perfect, photo-realistic, image and pays close attention to his subject’s muscles, ensuring that it looks as lifelike as possible. He works on a large scale canvas, which means that his art is closely admired and any little mistake will be easily identified. He enjoys drawing water, and he does it well! He pays particular attention to how light would bounce off water and uses hyper-realism to enhance the effect. Due to his artwork being viewed in large scale, he also adds so much detail to the face and skin of the subjects. He focuses specifically on the pores and ensures that they look super realistic. ("Jono Dry Biography - Rossouw Modern", 2018).
