Painter Robert Earle Wood was born in Gardena, California, in 1926. He earned his BA in painting from Pomona College and, following his tour of duty in World War II, earned his MFA from Claremont College where he studied under Phil Dike, Millard Sheets, and Jean Ames, focusing on watercolor. He began exhibiting in the late 1940s, and went on to show at the National Academy of Design (NY) as well as regular exhibitions with the California Water Color Society and the West Coast Watercolor Society, among others. By the 1960s had earned a reputation as one of California's leading Modernist watercolor artists. 

Wood also had a prolific teaching career. Among the schools he taught at were Otis Art Instutue, Scripps College, and the BRandt-Dike Summer School of Painting, and he traveled internationally to direct workshops on watercolor techniques in Russia, Sweden, France, Ireland, Tahiti, Jamaica, and many other countries. In 1961 he founded the Robert E. Wood School of Painting in the San Bernadino Mountains in Southern California. Among his major commissions were twenty-two large scale murals for the Hotel Caminreal in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, in 1990.

Over the span of his career he held upwards of fifty one-man exhibitions. He died in Redlands, California, in 1999.