Frank Owen (b. 1939) is an American abstract painter known for an innovative, process-oriented approach to acrylic paint. He earned his B.A. (1966) and M.A. (1968) from University of California, Davis, where he studied with William T. Wiley and Wayne Thiebaud alongside artists including David Gilhooly, Richard Shaw, Stephen Kaltenbach and Bruce Nauman. Owen served as Thiebaud’s teaching assistant the year after Nauman held the same position, later recalling how much both artists learned from Thiebaud about the “discipline of seeing.” Owen and Nauman became close friends and collaborators; in 1975, they made Pursuit, a film in which participants run on a conveyor belt until exhaustion. Owen’s vibrant abstract paintings frequently draw inspiration from the intricate structures, colors and patterns of nature. In the 1970s, he developed a distinctive technique he calls “painting in verso,” building complex layers of acrylic paint in reverse on a temporary surface before transferring the resulting paint skin to canvas. The process gives his paintings remarkable visual depth while challenging conventional distinctions between painting and object-making. Owen received National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in 1978–79 and 1989–90. His innovative manipulation of acrylic has established a distinctive place for his work within postwar process-oriented abstraction.