Robert Gordon Kemp was born in Toronto, Ontario, in 1928. His professional life was rooted in the artistic and commercial culture of mid-twentieth-century Toronto before he later settled near Blue Mountain in southern Georgian Bay, Ontario.
Kemp trained at Northern Vocational & Technical Institute in Toronto and graduated in 1946. The school, later known as Northern Vocational School and Northern Secondary School, was a Toronto vocational institution whose programs included practical and artistic training.
In 1947 he attended the Banff School of Fine Arts in Alberta. Founded in 1933 by the University of Alberta and known by that name from 1935, the school developed a broad arts program and expanded its permanent campus in the postwar period. Kemp also continued his artistic education through the Famous Artists Course in Westport, Connecticut, receiving feedback on his work from Norman Rockwell.
After completing his Toronto training in 1946, Kemp worked for Taber, Dulmage and Feheley art studios in Toronto. The position placed his early career within the city's commercial art environment, where studio practice and commissioned visual work were closely connected.
Kemp became art director at Hayhurst Advertising in Toronto in 1954. Hayhurst was part of Canada's established advertising industry and developed into a major agency during the postwar decades. Kemp's work there connected his artistic training with commercial illustration and art direction.
In 1961 he became a self-employed artist and moved to a chalet at the base of Blue Mountain, Ontario. He sold paintings through a gallery attached to the chalet and produced landscapes and rural scenes associated with the southern Georgian Bay region. He held twelve exhibitions in the Blue Mountains area and continued working there until his death in 1988.
Kemp held twelve exhibitions in the Blue Mountains area and developed a body of paintings and drawings depicting rural Ontario and the southern Georgian Bay region.
His paintings received five awards and entered the collections of the Tom Thomson Memorial Gallery in Owen Sound, Ontario, and Princess Anne of the British royal family.
Following Kemp's death, a trust administered by the Blue Mountain Foundation for the Arts established the annual Robert G. Kemp Arts Award to encourage artists in the southern Georgian Bay region.
Kemp married Barbara Flexman in 1966. They had two sons, Christopher, born in 1967, and Gordon, born in 1970.
