George Elmslie Owen was born in Stirling and was educated at George Watson's School, Edinburgh. After service in WW1 he started to study Medicine at Edinburgh Unviersity in 1919, but soon decided that this was not his metier so transferred to the Edinburgh College of Art in 1921, where he studied under Gerald Moira.
In 1923 he went to Paris to work at L'Académie Moderne under Fernand Leger and Amedée Ozenfant, who with Braque were major influences on all his subsequent work. During these years he spent summers painting in Brittany.
He was elected a member of the Royal Society of British Artists in 1933. He began his teaching career at the Westminster School of Art where he worked alongside Mark Gertler and Bernard Meninsky amongst others.
When the Westminster School was closed at the outbreak of the Second World War, Owen worked as a Camouflage Officer under the Ministry of Home Security. Later in the war he became Secretary of the War Artists Committee.
Towards the end of the war he became ill and spent many months in the King Edward VII Sanatorium at Midhurst.
It was during this time that he forsook easel painting and started working in gouache which could be done in bed. Leaving London for health reasons in 1946 to live in Sussex, he became a part-time teacher at the Brighton College of Art and Crafts where he remained until 1962.
Owen remains one of the very few British artists to have studied under Leger, adopting his distinctive form of 'Purist' cubism for his whole career.