Frank Owen (artist)


Frank Owen is an American abstract painter based in Keene, New York.

Early life and education

Owen was born in 1939 in Kalispell, Montana and spent much of his childhood in Woodland, California.
After two years at Antioch College, Owen returned to California and attended Sacramento State before joining the University of California, Davis arts program. At UC Davis, Owen studied under William T. Wiley and Wayne Thiebaud alongside artists including David Gilhooly, Richard Shaw, Stephen Kaltenbach and Bruce Nauman. While a student, Owen exhibited works in Davis, Chico and Sacramento, and collaborated with Nauman on 16mm film projects. He graduated with a B.A. in 1966 and an M.A. in 1968, and received a Regents Fellowship in 1967-1968.

Artistic career

Owen moved to New York after completing his M.A., joining a community of SoHo-based artists. His first solo New York show at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1972 included a number of large canvases described by the art critic David L. Shirey as "esembling something like Paisley prints or enlarged marble paper gone berserk". The large works produced during this period were described in 1974 by Newsweek art critic Douglas Davis as "richly impacted with rough, writhing shapes and textured in hundreds of colors that have been poured and whipped onto the surface."
In 1975 Owen again collaborated with Bruce Nauman on the film project Pursuit, in which 16 people are shown running on a conveyor belt, one by one, until exhausted.
In 1979, Owen established a professional relationship with the Nancy Hoffman Gallery that continues to the present day. His first solo show with Hoffman took place in 1981, again featuring large-scale works including one eighteen feet wide.
After moving permanently to the Adirondacks in 1981 to join his wife and her family, Owen's work began to include elements drawn from the surroundings of his new home, as he described in a 1987 interview:
Since 1999, Owen's work has been roughly divided into two series: Venetians, inspired by the colors of Venetian glass beads, and works that draw from the seasonal colors of the Adirondacks and embed images of leaves, sticks, and stones between layers of paint.

Style and technique

Owen's early professional work is built upon the gestural abstraction of Jackson Pollock, using acrylic paint partially mixed with vivid pigments and poured on paper or canvas from buckets, bottles or caps, then manipulated to create a marbled effect. In 1973 the critic Peter Schjeldahl described this early work as having a "particular dialectic... between an overall 'marbleized' look that is essentially impersonal — it is hard to imagine that a mere human hand could have performed anything so intricately gorgeous — and subtle, intelligently directed exertions of drawing and composition that become apparent on closer scrutiny."
The most prominent technique in Owen's work is a distinctive process known as "painting in verso". Owen adopted this method in the 1970s at the prompting of his friend Art Schade, initially using large beds of modelling clay, carved and cut to create spaces into which paint could be poured. Once dry, the paint was lifted from the clay, manipulated further, and affixed to the canvas front-to-back to create a three-dimensional surface.
Owen shifted from clay to use high-density polyethylene as the base to create the "skins" that make up his works; he describes himself as a "laminator", visualizing the finished piece and assembling it in layers:
Throughout his career, Owen's work has featured vibrant juxtaposed colors, with later works making frequent use of color disharmony between organic and geometric forms.

Academic career

After graduating from UC Davis, Owen took up a position at Sacramento State before moving to the east coast. Between 1970 and 1980 he taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York. During the 1980s he held visiting artist and lecturer positions, including at Virginia Commonwealth University and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He completed his academic career at the University of Vermont, joining its arts faculty in 1993 and retiring as a full professor in 2011.

Selected public collections

Houston, Texas
In 1963, William T. Wiley bought an oddly-slanted wood and linoleum step stool at a junk shop in Mill Valley, California for fifty cents, and gave it to Bruce Nauman, who kept it in his studio. The stool attracted the attention of students and faculty at the UC Davis art program, as a found object that provided "cultish inspiration", provoking drawings, sculptures and other work. In September 1966 it was exhibited alongside those works in the Slant Step Show at the Berkeley Gallery in San Francisco; during the exhibition, the step vanished from the gallery, supposedly taken by Richard Serra to New York and subsequently returned to California by Stephen Kaltenbach.
In 2010, Owen disclosed that he had taken the step from Davis in 1967 and used it as a teaching aid in his various faculty positions. He and other UC Davis alumni artists collectively served as its caretakers, occasionally loaning it to exhibitions and dubbing themselves "The New York Society for the Preservation of the Slant Step": "Somebody has got to keep the damn thing so we -- myself, Arthur Schade, and a couple of other buddies -- kept it."
In 2012, Owen and Schale donated the step to UC Davis in conjunction with the exhibition "Flatlanders on the Slant", valuing the piece for tax purposes at the fifty cents it cost Wiley in 1963. In 2014, the writer and artist Peter Plagens established the purpose of the step: it was designed to raise the knees while defecating.