A well-known Southwest painter, print-maker and gallery owner, he did finely rendered, etching like portraits of time-worn Native Americans. His goal was to depict the dignity of his subjects. He was born in Sioux City Iowa and raised in a small home overlooking the Missouri River. He studied art and writing at the University of Northern Iowa and taught high school in Iowa. In the late 1960s, he moved to Colorado and opened Breckenridge Galleries. After living briefly in Taos and Colorado, he opened the Howell Gallery in Santa Fe. He was an accomplished photographer, and writer of an art computer program. Frank Howell was described as "having the remarkable ability to make a person feel that, for a moment in time, they were the most important person in his life. Understand that painting is a wonderful kind of mirror that reflects the inner you, not your external appearance. You will have a sense of a kind of timelessness, a humanness the poetics in all things."