Robert graduated from the University of Virginia Medical School and spent two years at the Carl Jung Institute in Zurich before establishing a private psychiatry practice in San Francisco, where he helped found a school for autistic children and a gay doctors group.
In 1997 he closed his office and began seeing himself more as an artist than a doctor. Purchasing an old house and barn in Oakland, he made it a community center for art shows, concerts, benefits, and community gatherings. A largely self-taught artist, he exhibited his work throughout the area, and he remained famously opinionated and fiercely independent until he passed away in Oakland Nov. 25, 2020.