Painter and sculptor Robert Fink was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1905, the son of artist Denman Fink. As a child he showed an aptitude for watercolor painting and was encouraged by his father to pursue visual art. The Finks relocated to Florida in the early 1920s where Robert began apprenticing with his father as a mural painter and designer for a tourism campaign for Coral Gables, the city where they lived. This was cut short by the Depression, however, and Robert Fink enrolled in courses at Miami University for a time before returning to New York to attend the Art Students League.

In Manhattan Fink found work as an illustrator, with commissions from several periodicals as well as book publishers, his work appearing in River of Grass by Marjorie Stoneman Douglas and The Great Horned Spoon by Eugene Wright. He became a member of the American Watercolor Society and maintained a studio dedicated to his personal watercolor painting. In 1947, a fire wiped out his studio and all of the paintings within. Following this, he abandoned painting for over a decade, focusing instead on graphic arts and delving into sculpture. In the mid 1960s he returned to painting, now working in oils in the Hard Edge genre.

Fink's work is held in the collections of the Neuberger Museum, the Hudson River Museum, the Reading Museum (Pennsylvania, PA), and others. Private and corporate commissions include lare sculptures for Cross Westchester Executive Park, North Elmsford, NY; Scarsdale Library, NY; and Phelps Memorial Hospital Center, North Terrytown, NY. In 1989 a retrosepctive of his work was held at the Westchester Community College. He died the same year on July 9 in New York.