Robin Jones is a Seattle-based painter who was, for much of her life, a professional theatre actor. That background is present in her paintings — not as a metaphor but as a methodology. Theatre trained her to understand the power of story, to inhabit perspectives unlike her own, and to take seriously the question of who gets to be a subject. Her figurative painting practice is built on those same commitments. She paints girls and women, human and non-human animals, the natural world and its intersections with human life. She paints young people specifically because they will inherit the consequences of decisions being made now, and because they are already among the most active voices in environmental and animal rights movements.
She describes herself as an animist — oriented by earth-based spiritual practices that understand all living beings as sharing sentience and significance. That framework shapes what she paints and how she frames it. The paintings are not illustrations of environmental concern; they are arguments for interconnectedness, made in the specific language of paint and form. She calls her paintings “portraits of the future” — the subjects depicted will be shaped by the choices the present makes about land, species, and consumption. Her paintings ask the viewer to consider how they move through the world.
She works in oil on canvas, acrylic, and digital media, and has incorporated gold leaf and titanium leaf on aluminum panel — materials that carry their own history of value and preciousness, which is part of their meaning in compositions about ecological relationships. Her four works at JG include Home — a woman alone with a lighthouse and seabirds — Like A Black Chip Out Of The Water, a meditation on human and orca coexistence, The Source Is Within You, and Elizabeth’s Story on aluminum panel with gold and titanium leaf.
My love of figurative art stems from a desire to evoke empathy and compassion — to elevate those who may not typically find themselves subjects on gallery and museum walls, to examine sentience and earth-based spiritual practices such as animism, and to convey the interconnectedness of all living beings on the planet. I like to think of my paintings as ‘portraits of the future.’
