Born in Bloomington, Illinois, Ronau Woiceske first studied at the St. Louis School of Fine Art. In 1924, he and his family moved to Woodstock, NY where he studied painting with John Carlson and lived the remainder of his life. Woiceske taught himself to etch and eventually he took on students including Emil Ganso. Elizabeth McCausland wrote that "instead of just making a cold winter landscape by using the white of the paper to suggest snow, as many etchers do, Woiceske used aquatint over the already etched plate like a wash of tone." His work is in the permanent collections of many museums including the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress, the Los Angeles Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.