Robin Jones took refuge in oil and canvas when Hurricane Ike devastated Houston.

A career actor, she had been working in theater across the U.S., with the Texas city her latest stop.

“The whole city was shut down,” she said in a telephone interview from her home in Lamy. “I just kept painting. That’s when I decided I’m going to make this shift.”

The sun-splashed results of that career change can be seen in her current work at Santa Fe’s Blue Rain Gallery.

Although she has taken an occasional drawing class, Jones is largely self-taught. She favors portraits of women and girls paired with environmental themes, highlighted by 24-karat gold leaf.

Jones spent her childhood near Toledo, Ohio after spending her first four years of life in Frankfurt, Germany. Although she drew and painted as a child, she felt drawn to the theater, doing her graduate work at the University of Delaware.

“I was really lucky,” she said. “I got to work with some of the greatest directors in the English-speaking theater.”

But she continued to create art, turning a Santa Monica apartment garage into a studio.

“I was thinking, ‘I wish I could do this for a living,’ ” she said. Although she enjoyed the sense of community and collaboration inherent in acting, she longed for independence.

“The artistic control was part of it,” she said. “And the desire to say more. With painting, I had complete control. I can tell the story I wanted to tell with no interference.”

So she read books and traveled to galleries and museums.

Much of her work focuses on Indigenous women and girls, as well as endangered species.

“For many years I painted every single day,” Jones said. “I had a day job as a wine rep.”

She moved to Seattle, where she met her partner and showed her work in restaurants and cafés. But the darkness of the Pacific Northwest weighed on her and she thought of New Mexico.

“I’ve always loved New Mexico,” she said. “I started coming here when I was 4 years old. My parents took me to Taos Pueblo. Part of it was Georgia O’Keeffe and the Native influence, so I’ve always come back.”

She moved to Lamy in 2020, just weeks before the pandemic shutdown.

“It really postponed getting to know the community,” she said. “It was really lovely to get into my favorite gallery on my first try.”

Jones paints from her own or someone else’s photographs, sketching her ideas on the canvas first. One the design is set, she adds 24-karat gold leaf highlights.

That inspiration came from the Austrian symbolist painter Gustav Klimt, as well as the Renaissance artists.

“Actually, it makes the figures pop a little bit,” Jones said.

“I’ll Meet You There,” her painting of a girl facing an enlarged, highly-detailed bee, encapsulates her ecological passions. Bees are losing habitat to urban sprawl, the plowing up of grasslands and prairies for agriculture and the changing climate, as well as pesticides.

“I have a number of paintings I started with bees,” she said, “just magnifying them so you could see them. And also, symbolically, to express their outsized importance.”

Similarly, “We Are Just Visitors to this Time, This Place” captures an Aboriginal girl with a red-tailed black cockatoo.

“She’s in ceremonial makeup,” Jones said. The birds are “critically endangered in the southern part of Australia. The symbol around her is an Aboriginal symbol.

“I started doing a lot of Indian girls and women,” she continued. “They’re so tied to the land and the knowledge of the land. They know how to care for it and farm it sustainably.”

Other paintings pair women and girls with tigers. According to the zodiac, 2022 was the Year of the Tiger. “Like Burning a Renaissance Painting” show an Amazon woman carrying coffee beans as a tree looms in the background. It’s an ode, or maybe an elegy, to the disappearing rain forests.

“The Amazon is the lungs of the planet, but unprecedented destruction of the Amazon has been happening in the last year.”

Jones says she was born an artist.

“It was just the need to create,” she said. “It’s a need to do it; you don’t have a choice. I need to make stuff.”

Her next Blue Rain solo show is slated for October.

Editor’s note: The Journal continues the once-a-month series “From the Studio” with Kathaleen Roberts, as she takes an up-close look at an artist.