Robert Burke was born and raised in the North West Territories. This is where much of his experience and concepts are drawn from. He refers to himself as an "Aboriginal" because of the two cultures he has experienced through his black military father and Chipewyan mother. His visions are accounts of the timberland and wildlife within the forests where he lived and worked as a logger most of his life. His triptychs are abstracted ideas and thoughts, jumbled together to create a vividly fascinating world of human and animal figures. It was during his early twenties that Robert Burke started his artistic endeavours but then went into logging. It hasn't been until recently that he has taken up the brush again, becoming an emerging artist with a background as colourful as his paintings.

"My paintings represent to me, my quest of an understanding of Aboriginal spiritualism. I realized that as a Metis with Negro ancestry, my view would follow a different line than the First Nation or white people."