11x13.5"
My name is Robert H. Wissink, I was born in St. Thomas, Ontario, Canada in 1969. My first experiences as an artist took place when I was in my teen years and took a drafting course in High School. I quickly discovered that drafting was not my cup of tea and took those drafting skills and started with some of my own designs. It was at this point I realized that I wanted to pursue my career in the Visual Arts field. So it is safe to say that my drafting course in school is what started my career in the Arts, and also what sparked my love of drawing. My influences were local artists all living in St. Thomas at the time. One was and still is a friend of mine. Her name is Laura Wormke, and she is currently the Curator of the St. Thomas Art Centre and Gallery. I believe that being an artist is something that one is born to do and not necessarily learned in school. I went on with my work and was using practical experience, trial and error, self learning as my teachers. It was here that I further expanded on my knowledge in the Op Art Field. In my later teens, I was told by different people that my style of artwork wasn’t something people would be interested in and that my art was not good enough. Unfortunately. I, at the time foolishly believed these people and stopped my drawing all together. However, thirty some odd years later, I have started my business, Magoo’s Geo-Metric Arts and once again started drawing and have been going strong ever since. My family is a big family. I am the youngest of six children. My parents have always been very supportive of anything any of us kids decided to pursue. My older siblings have also been very supportive of my decision to become an artist and are very interested in my work and following my career. As far as my drawing style goes, it would be classified as abstract, no color. I love the almost architectural designs of my drawings. I have tens of thousands of hours done in my field and plan on continuing with this line of work for a long time to come. I work primarily in pencil on sketch paper ranging in size from 5 x 7 to 14 x 17 and I currently work from my home studio.