Photograph by Ben Stechschulte
Every Adirondack small town has its own cast of characters whose presence becomes as familiar as its landmarks, and just as entwined with its sense of place. For the better part of five decades, the affable Keene Valley artist Frank Owen has played a recurring role around town, with frequent appearances at the Ausable Inn, where you may find him chatting up hikers, contractors and anyone else who happens upon the only local watering hole.
Owen’s face was even more familiar than usual last August, at the reception for his Keene Arts retrospective, where life-size cutouts of his bespectacled and goateed mug were handed out to guests. The masks were a nod to the show’s tongue-in-cheek title, “Let’s Be Frank.”
And who wouldn’t want to be Frank? The 86-year-old painter has pulled off the rare feat of succeeding as an artist while residing in a tiny mountain town hundreds of miles from the epicenter of the American art world. His artwork is in the collections of Yale University; the Corcoran Gallery, in Washington DC; and nearly two dozen other museums across the country. He spends most days in his studio, working on vibrant large-scale abstract paintings that, in the words of his New York City dealer, Nancy Hoffman, are “a visual equivalent of the pleasure principle.”
As part of what might be the last generation to consider art a viable career path and a respectable profession in its own right, Frank reckons he was dealt a good hand. “What a fortunate thing to get to spend my life improvising and discovering things,” he says.
His aptitude for art revealed itself early. As a 10-year-old in Sacramento, California, where his family settled after his father served as a Navy medical corpsman in the Pacific during World War II, young Franklin produced a drawing inspired by Cubism—which he had read about in Life magazine—and declared it modern art.
Never one for idleness, Frank worked from a young age. He delivered newspapers, jerked sodas, fitted suits at a menswear shop and played washtub bass as part of a hotel house band. During the summers of 1959 and 1960, while working at the Manhattan department store B. Altman on a work-study program through Antioch College, Frank was invited to be a camp counselor at the Baldwin School camp in Keene Valley.
His first beer that summer at the Spread Eagle Inn, as the Ausable Inn was then called, offered no hint that he was destined to become a regular. It was when he met a young local woman named Martha Lee Edmonds that his fate was sealed. “We sparked romance and all that stuff,” Owen says, wiggling his fingers and eyebrows suggestively.
Martha Lee’s Keene Valley roots go back to the American Revolution, when one of her ancestors was a soldier in the Continental Army stationed in this area. For most of the 19th century, what are now known as the Cascade Lakes between Keene and Lake Placid were called Edmonds Ponds. The Adrian’s Acres neighborhood in Keene Valley, near the Garden, is named for her father, a contractor and developer. (Though he didn’t know it at the time, Frank’s family tree also includes a local connection; he is a distant cousin of North Elba firebrand John Brown.)
Martha Lee and Frank had a long-distance courtship for seven years, while he returned to Sacramento to finish his education. After a six-month tour as a Coast Guard reservist, Frank enrolled at UC Davis, where he pursued a graduate degree in art and served as a teaching assistant for the artist Wayne Thiebaud, who was famous for his paintings of cakes and pies.
The couple married in 1967, and Martha Lee moved to California, where she worked as a teacher while Frank finished his studies. The following year they moved to Manhattan, where they became part of the emerging SoHo art scene. Their New York City rite of passage was getting swindled out of their down payment on a loft by the founder of the Fluxus art movement, George Maciunas, whose accounting practices were as creative as his artwork.
In a more promising turn, Frank signed on with the legendary dealer Leo Castelli, who also worked with some of the most influential contemporary artists of the 20th century, including Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, Frank Stella and Roy Lichtenstein. Castelli had a unique arrangement for artists on his roster, even those still early in their careers. He provided a monthly stipend of $500, an amount that covered rent and groceries, allowing artists to focus on their work without the immediate pressure of sales. While the money was advanced against future earnings, it provided a rare and steady financial foundation.
The following decade was an exciting period of growth and creativity, but by 1980 things had begun to change. Martha Lee had grown tired of living on the top floor of a loft with a leaking roof, and by then, they had a daughter, Kate, born in 1971, who was now of school age. Martha Lee and Kate moved back to Keene Valley, while Frank stayed on in the city. He spent summers in the Adirondacks, as they had always done.
That spring, he accepted an offer to be a visiting artist at Virginia Commonwealth University, in Richmond. When the semester ended, he and a student assistant packed up his studio in a 25-foot U-Haul, loaded with art supplies and a new collection of paintings, and headed back to Manhattan to hang his first show at the Nancy Hoffman Gallery.
As he pulled up to the gallery, Nancy greeted him with a somber expression. “I’ve got bad news, your loft is burning,” Frank remembers her saying. “It’s on fire, present tense.”
Frank and his assistant rushed the four blocks to his building. By the time they arrived, the fire had been extinguished, but the damage was severe. Smoke filled the space, and everything inside was left waterlogged and ruined.
Frank spent the summer in Keene Valley, as usual, but this time the move was permanent. He rented the top floor of Pete Bigelow’s storage barn to use as a studio—he later purchased the building—and joined the small pantheon of modernist artists, along with David Smith and Harold Weston, to make their home in the Adirondacks.
Keene Valley in the 1980s and ’90s was a “lively place to be,” Frank says, especially in the summer. Frank fell in with a circle of men, artist types that included novelist Russell Banks, poet Roger Mitchell, and artist-musician Scott Renderer, who gathered at each other’s studios to drink beer and talk shop. Banks dubbed them the Valley Boys.
Still, there was always plenty of solitude and time to focus on making art and experimentation, liberated from the distractions of attending friends’ openings and other art-world schmooze-fests.
In a 2010 interview, Frank says he is often asked how the move to the Adi-rondacks affected his work, whether he misses the excitement of the city and the energy of being in conversation with other artists. His answer: “I go down about three or four times a year and keep everybody up late at night and exhaust all my friends and I see everything the city has to offer and then I get on a northbound train at Grand Central and quite happily ride back up here.
“And this is a charming community,” he adds. “It’s a small village with just enough people, many of whom are very interesting, all of them are positive. And all dedicated to an idea of being in a community. That’s one thing that is quite nice.”
In the late 1980s, when Governor Mario Cuomo established the Commission on the Adirondacks in the 21st Century to make recommendations on land-use issues within the Blue Line, Frank was inspired to produce his only overtly Adirondack-themed artwork, which he describes as a kind of visual journalism. He attended meetings and protests and took photographs, which he incorporated, along with newspaper clippings, into a 25-foot-wide, 14-panel painting. The piece was part of a 1992 Adirondack Park centennial exhibition at the Adirondack Museum (now Adirondack Experience), in Blue Mountain Lake. Cuomo was in attendance, and asked Frank why his head appeared in three different sizes. In Frank’s telling, he replied, “We don’t know how big of a man you are yet.”
Otherwise, any Adirondack references show up in a more abstract way. Whereas fellow Keene Valley artist Harold Weston painted soaring mountain- and cloudscapes, Frank casts his eyes downward, to the detritus of the forest floor, finding inspiration in the colors and textures of decaying leaves and rocks and twigs he picks up on his walks. He photocopies these forest finds and incorporates them through an elaborate technique he developed to create a multilayered effect.
He often works in verso, or front to back, painting on top of hardened sheets of clear acrylic gel, which he then cuts into shapes that he can collage and layer onto large canvases. The highly varnished surfaces and vivid colors give the paintings a glass-like appearance.
One of the hallmarks of Frank’s work is experimenting with new techniques and materials. He often fashions tools out of everyday items, such as a scraper he devised out of rubber door molding. In a 2018 interview with artist and critic Alexi Worth, he says, “Valley Hardware [in Keene Valley] is a central factor of my creative life.”
For a self-described “outgoing and buzzy guy,” the inevitable shrinking of his social circle has been the downside of longevity. He is as lively a conversationalist as ever and remains driven to create and explore new ideas. He heeds his own advice, shared in a 1986 article for the Adirondack Daily Enterprise, “The main thing I do is to keep busy. Don’t stop. Because if you do, you might just stop altogether.”
