Shadows, horns and balancing the darkness with the light are recognisable themes in South African artist Jono Dry’s hyper-realistic pencil drawings. Dry outlines his journey as an artist and opens up about how mental illness has influenced much of his subject matter in an interview with MatieMedia’s Aiden Louw.
Jono Dry in his apartment in Vredehoek. He uses his spare room as a studio, with lights and screens which help him to draw. PHOTO: Aiden Louw
What started out as a childhood passion for artist Jono Dry has turned into a career in his twenties. Dry used social media platforms to market himself and is now a successful and independent artist with over 300 000 Instagram followers and a global market.
Dry works from photo references and has always felt a desire to improve upon his life drawing. In 2020, he was accepted into the Florence Academy of Art, where he was excited to finally receive artistic training. However, when lockdown hit, his dreams of improving his skills were crushed. This was a dark time for Dry. Strong feelings of “imposter syndrome” began taking form, he says.
The sharp edges
Dry has had anxiety for many years. Mental illness as a theme permeates much of his work through his use of horned figures, he explains.
“I think horns are beautiful. Aesthetically, they’re beautiful,” says Dry. “But then they really beautifully touch on aspects of mental illness. It’s protruding from the head. It’s sharp, dangerous, in some ways viewed as a demonic or evil thing which is misunderstood.”
“It’s a burden. They’re heavy, and they can hurt the people around you, or hurt you. But it’s something that if you can learn to live with, learn to manage, adds to a beautiful character.”
Dry’s own horns have been a burden to him in the past. He says that he had become disenchanted with his career in 2016 and was struggling emotionally. He had been working from home at the time and began experimenting with turpentine, a paint thinner, to see whether he could use it to darken the graphite in his drawings.
Turpentine has a very strong, at times intoxicating, smell and needs good ventilation, which Dry did not have. He found himself in an anxious, isolated space where he was glued to his apartment and his drawing, a figure which he described as “in anguish, kind of covering itself in very visible pain”.
After a few days of a turpentine-induced shut-in, Dry managed to leave his apartment. He was not gone long before he experienced his first panic attack and immediately rushed back. He had grown used to the smell of the paint thinner, but as soon as he opened his front door, he says that it became overwhelming.
He suddenly realised just how sterile his apartment had become. “There were no plants or anything. It was the first year I was living alone […] and there were loads of dead insects on the windowsills. The house was just full of death.”
“I immediately went out, bought some plants, and put some life into my house. I opened all my windows,” he says. The drawing that he had been working on during this time is the only original he has ever kept.
Jono Dry, holding his most personal drawing in his Vredehoek apartment. It is the only drawing that he has ever kept the original of. PHOTO: Aiden Louw
Balancing the light
While Dry’s journey has not always been brightly lit, he says that he feels he is at a point in both his life and his career where he can see more clearly.
Initially, he says that his work quickly became expensive after he began pairing up with art galleries. “They were only interested in money, so they pushed the price up at a very rapid rate. Then I got picked up by a European investor and then my market shifted to Europe and America. So, I was priced out of the South African market super-fast.”
Because his work was not shown in local galleries, Dry says that he has always felt isolated from other artists in Cape Town. He has also never received any formal art education and says that this has added to his feelings of not belonging in any of the artistic circles around him.
He has recently ended his exclusivity contract and is working as a fully independent artist for the first time. He says that he has also started to feel the positive effects of his anxiety medication. This has freed him up to experiment more with his business and with his personal life.
“[Dry] likes to know as much as possible and look into things and bring them together in a certain way, whether that’s conversational, or with his art… he likes to be experimental,” says Dry’s studio assistant who goes by ‘L’.
“I am very interested in business and helping other people realize their dreams and initiatives,” says Dry. “I want to help struggling artists to create content to market themselves in this new modern world.”
Dry says that he produces online video content for artists and provides them with a computer and a camera to record their work.
“Venus”, “Guardian”, and “Ritual” by Jono Dry are currently being exhibited in Austria at Galerie Kovacek & Zetter. PHOTO/ Supplied: Jono Dry
Not so “arty farty”
Dry’s current studio is in Zonneblom, Cape Town, and is adorned with his drawings and horned skulls. Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain” is creeping through the speakers, harmonising with the gentle blows of the outside leaves.
On the coffee table lies a copy of Anatomy for The Artist by Sarah Simblet, a book his mother gave him as a child and out of which he continues to study for his drawings.
Pam Bentley, Dry’s studio manager, sits hunkered over a desk. She tells MatieMedia that working for a younger artist is refreshing and describes the workspace as collaborative.
“It’s such a convergence between business and art […] artists get a bad rap for not being business minded… that they’re just these arty farty people who don’t know anything about money,” says Bentley.
“But it’s been really great to work with somebody who finds business as interesting as art…as a young artist, you are your own business.”
Jono Dry’s leafy studio is situated in Zonneblom, Cape Town. Here, he works with his team to create content for his YouTube videos and take photographs for his references. PHOTO: Aiden Louw
‘Renaissance of my early twenties’
“I feel safer to live in the world a bit more,” says Dry.
Jono Dry seated on his chair in his Vredehoek apartment, showing his freshly painted toenails. PHOTO: Aiden Louw
Dry finds himself trying things that he was once afraid of. Things like swimming in the ocean, diving, owning a motorbike which he says he “stalls all over Cape Town”, and even branching out of his medium to experiment with etching.
He laughs and describes this as “not a mid-life crisis […] but a Renaissance of my early twenties”.
Since he has become independent and braver, his business has been booming, says Dry. His studio is now filled more with work-talk than with drawing, which he has started to do from home again.
What he once described as a sterile space is now covered in plants, drawings, books, and board games. He loves working there.