Renee Palmer-Jones moved from Morrison, Colorado to Anthem, Arizona with her husband, Jack Jones and many pets. She recently discovered a love for painting after denying her instincts about a possible artistic talent for many years.

Travel is an important part of Renee’s life, and through this pastime, she found herself overwhelmingly drawn to art museums and art shows. In 2002, during a trip to the Impressionist artist’s Musee’ D’Orsay in Paris with her daughters, Lauren and Jane, Renee realized that she needed to pick up a brush and learn to paint the people and images that she thought were important. Upon returning home, Renee set upon a primarily self-taught course in oil painting and has been happily rendering lifelike images every day since then.

She calls her style of painting "Contemporary Realism" and captures her subjects in vivid color, motion and life during everyday experience and emotion. Renee’s world-wide travels allow her to view, photograph and recreate exciting images of people, animals and exotic cultures which she renders into startling oil paintings. Art viewers will identify two distinctly different styles of painting, one which is acutely detailed and accurate while the other is suggested by free brush strokes. Renee feels that it is important to be able to capture some images in the "plein air" style very quickly, and that other subjects require painstaking detail in order to convey realism.

Renee has since studied under the tutelage of master painters Kim English, Ron Hicks, and Robert Lemler at the Scottsdale Artists School and the Art Student’s League of Denver.

Renee is a member of the North Valley Plein Air Painter’s league, the Sonoran Arts League in Carefree, AZ, and the FLAIR art group in Anthem, AZ, and a founding board member of the Arts Council of the North Valley.

Renee Palmer-Jones holds a master’s degree in Nonprofit Management from Regis University and devotes a great deal of time to the promotion of Native American art and culture. She has served on many nonprofit Boards of Directors including the Colorado Endowment for the Humanities, the Lupus Foundation of Colorado, and was a founding member of the Tesoro Foundation among others.

Through her work with the Tesoro Foundation in Morrison, Colorado, Renee became acutely aware of the crisis of Native American artisans who are struggling to preserve the traditional culture and artistic practices of the American Indian. Much of Renee’s art is dedicated to honoring the importance of Native Americans in today’s society and in western history and art viewers will detect a common thread of this theme in her work. She is also an historian at heart, and works to bring the western cowboy to life.