Jay Juno

Coffee in watercolor and ink...

Fika time, midnight sun style~☕🌄

For those who don't know, fika is essentially a coffee break that originated from Sweden and is usually an occasion to relax with friends and colleagues. The concept of fika is popular in all Nordic countries though including Norway, Denmark, and Finland.

Stereometry is a way of learning how to draw the human figure by breaking it down into geometric shapes and basic generic measurements. The stereometric approach to drawing people was popularized during the Renaissance by artists like Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Dürer, etc.

I've spent so much time the last few years on still lifes, color studies, and landscapes that my anatomy knowledge has atrophied a bit, so I'm going back over some of the basics. I'm going through the Basic Human Anatomy by Roberto Osti to help me with this, and what I like about his approach is that he encourages artists to actually understand how muscles and bones work in the human body (instead of just copying them visually like how most artists do....)

I agree with Osti, in that the only way an artist can advance enough to draw people from imagination is to learn and understand how the human figure moves instead of just copying it.

To draw people from memory instead of relying on photographs or models, one needs to study where muscles are located, how they're connected in different spots, how certain movements cause certain muscles to stretch or bend, etc. The more an artist studies and internalizes this information, the more permanent the knowledge will become and eventually it'll become second nature.

I'm honoring my father by reading some of his favorite authors, Plato and Charles Schulz.

Love you and miss you every single day, dad...💙💔

Is July the absolute last month we have before the Strategic Petroleum Reserve falls down to 250 million barrels? The SPR is the world's emergency stockpile of crude oil, and it is stored in America where it is managed by the US government.

Once this emergency supply of oil drops to 250 million barrels, then oil and gas prices can no longer be kept artificially low by the world's governments and billionaires. Correct?

The deplorable rapist formally known as trump is trying to destroy even more lives with yet another sociopathic executive order.

As this rapist squats in the People's house, he's setting the stage to fire more federal employees without cause so he can replace them with trump loyalist traitors-

I keep hearing that most Americans can't read above a 6th grade reading level.

So with that in mind, recommending that they read Republic by Plato isn't going to do much good now, is it? Even if they read it, they probably won't understand it. Most people have to read Republic several times anyway before they start really getting it.

Understanding the Cave of Shadows from Republic is like trying to wake up from the Matrix from the 1990s- most people naturally struggle against this kind of awakening, because the truth sucks. Reality sucks, and most people struggle to handle that kind of truth.

Allegory of the cave, they usually call this cave of shadows, or something like that...

I think anyone who wants to try changing things for the better in America needs to understand what they're working with here, which is a caffeine/video game/social media addicted population that is largely borderline illiterate. Most Americans don't even know the difference between Socrates and Plato. They don't know the difference between a novel and a short story. They do know the difference between Nintendo and Sega, though.

Also, it seems most Americans aged 25 and under don't understand how to use a desktop computer nor the keyboard, having been raised almost entirely on tablets and smartphones with touchscreens. Most of these kids don't understand what ctrl+alt+delete means.

I've been ctrl+alt+deleting since I was in grade school, but I don't know how to teach that skill to the younger generation. I don't know how to pass this knowledge on, which is probably a sign that my generation has also been failed by the American public education system. It didn't fail my generation as badly as it's failing these kids now, but it was a colossal failure all the same.

I think my generation is the last generation to be taught how to write in cursive? Handwriting in general seems to be a dying art. Some of these kids struggle to write their own names because they're used to a program or AI prompt just giving it to them as a graphic on a screen. They're being taught to memorize graphics instead of learning to actually read letters.

In addition to all of this, social media has been dumbing the entire internet down since roughly 2008, which has further eroded the ability of the younger generations to self educate themselves when the public education system fails them, as it has failed them since the Reagan era of the 1980s.

So, how to reach this group?

Defund Data Centers

We're having the worst energy crisis in history right now, so we can't afford to power these damn data centers anyway. All construction of new data centers should be immediately halted, so that what remains of our precious energy isn't wasted on them. We can't even afford to take care of ourselves right now because of the energy crisis caused by the Strait of Hormuz being closed. We're already suffering because of rapist trump's stupid war against Iran. It's beyond selfish of billionaires to force these data centers through when Americans are already struggling so much right now.

People don't need data centers- we need clean water, clean energy, affordable housing, and we need the tech bro billionaires to go piss off somewhere. If the billionaires aren't going to help us? Then the least they can do is hide away in their bunkers, and leave the rest of us alone.

Are they really expecting Americans to sacrifice their own personal water and energy supplies to power these data centers? That seems to be the plan so far, with many Americans already suffering side effects because of these data centers being illegally built near their homes with no regard for the environment or for the people who live there.

Haven't Americans sacrificed enough already over these past several years? We have nothing left to sacrifice, billionaires! Stop stealing from us, you rich sociopathic parasites from Silicon Valley!

How much more of this are Americans going to tolerate?

“And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you."

-Some dude named Jesus

(Matthew 6:5-6 from the Christian Bible...)

The Rededicate 250 public prayer being performed by trump and his cult following today in Washington D.C. reeks of the worst hypocrisy. The whole thing is a joke! It's an insult to the real Jesus and everything he stood for. The real Jesus would never support or approve of trump's behavior, and real Christians know that. No genuine Christian with real love for the real Jesus would ever support an evil selfish imposter like trump.

This so-called public prayer is just another trump rally full of ignorant bigots pretending to be Christians when they are in fact traitors of the most unimaginable deplorability.

Another layer of paint and copper metal leaf applied to this portrait of Aphrodite Höst~ 🙏🏻🎨

Aphrodite is a character from naked. She's the mother of the protagonist, Sappho Höst. She's a witch too but more powerful.

The cat is Mr. M. He's a Maine Coon. Mr. M is short for Mr. Mistoffelees.

Her blue dress is pure Ultramarine Blue, the modern pigment for the traditional lapis lazuli, which was so expensive that it was usually reserved for holy figures like the Virgin Mary, angels, and even Jesus Christ himself. Her skin is still green in an attempt to emulate the verdaccio painting technique from the Renaissance, where artists applied warm colors over a green underpainting in order to make the warm flesh tones stand out more (green is the complement to red/orange).

This is my first time applying metal leaf to a canvas (I have applied copper leaf to paper before). I have a few sheets of gold and silver, but I'm not sure I'll use them on this painting.

Plato's Republic and the artwork of Gustav Klimt are my two main inspirations for incorporating metallics into my art.

This is oil paint and copper leaf on canvas.

Why are gas prices up and still going up? Why does food at the grocery store cost more now than it did just a few months ago? Well, it's because of trump's stupid war against Iran- the war has kept the Strait of Hormuz closed since February.