Robin Jones

Robin Jones spent her first four years of life in Frankfurt, Germany, and the rest of her childhood near Toledo, Ohio. She trained as a professional theater actor — a career that ran across the United States — and the painter's practice grew out of the actor's: an appreciation for the power of story, for the diversity of human expression, and for empathy as a discipline. She took refuge in oil painting during Hurricane Ike in Houston in 2008, and never stopped.

Jones is a figurative painter with a focus on the natural world and the influence of human activity on that world — galvanized, she has said, by climate change and the current mass extinction event. Her subjects are mostly girls, women, young people, and non-human animals, rendered with 24-karat gold leaf highlights — an approach drawn from Gustav Klimt and Renaissance painting. The intent is direct: portraits as advocacy, sentience as subject, animism as a position. She lives in Lamy, New Mexico, having moved there in 2020 from Seattle.