Born in 1950, Robert Wisner’s earliest memory involved an attraction to images - what happens visually and emotionally within a rectangle. In particular, he was drawn by the hand-rendered image, regardless of media.

In high school, Robert majored in art and won the Gold Key Scholastic Art Award. As a teenager, he discovered photography and was encouraged to pursue that as a career because it was more financially stable than painting. Wisner attended Rochester Institute of Technology for photo-illustration and worked three years as a commercial photographer. Interest in the painted image was rekindled and he returned to RIT and the Ruskin School of Drawing at Oxford, England.

To support his young family he worked as a carpenter by day and painted by night. He was informed that advertising agencies paid for drawing pictures of ad concepts and he went to work for Young and Rubicam in 1978. There he stayed for 23 years. He had an outstanding career and advanced from layout artist to art director and creative director.
“ I enjoyed advertising very much. When my young children asked ‘What’s your job?’ I would say, I go to work and think up ideas and then draw pictures of them. I always felt lucky that I had a job doing something I liked.”

Over the period of 23 years, Robert painted about 100 portrait commissions for corporate and private collections. He now devotes his full attention to painting.