Robert Aaron Frame was born on July 31, 1924, in San Fernando, California. His parents were Joseph Aaron Frame and Isabel Jardine Frame. He attended Pasadena City College and in 1942, enlisted in the U.S. Navy, where he served until 1946.

After the war, Frame enrolled at Pomona College, where he earned a Bachelor of Fine Art degree in 1948. At Pomona, he took classes with Millard Sheets (1907-1989). From 1947 to 1950, Frame studied with Henry Lee McFee (1886-1953) at Claremont College, where he earned a Master of Fine Art degree in 1951. In 1954, he married Emily Lee Rule.

Over the next twenty years, Frame won over twenty prizes in various painting exhibitions, among which were a First Prize, Arizona State Exhibition 1947; Second Prize, Arizona State Exhibition 1948; First Award, Los Angeles Municipal Art Exhibition, 1957; Purchase Prize, California State Exhibition 1958; and First Prize, National Orange Show, San Bernardino in 1959. In 1957, he won a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Painting and in 1965, he received the James D. Phelan Award, offered to young Californian artists and writers by the San Francisco Foundation.

All that time, Frame was teaching. From 1953 to 1962, he was instructor of painting at Pasadena City College and from 1958 to 1966, at Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. In 1965, he was visiting professor at Scripps College. From 1966 to 1969, he taught occasionally at the Laguna Beach School of Art. In 1966, Frame began teaching at Santa Barbara City College. He eventually moved to that city and taught until 1986.

Frame's art is characterized by bright colors and a strong sense of design and symmetry. He begins by sketching a linear framework representing the interior of a room, most often, looking out a window. Having established a solid composition, he proceeds to develop shapes within the framework. He strives for potent colors to accompany his strong lines. "Above all," Frame once said, "a painting must be a visual adventure beyond a simple representation, a metamorphosis into the magic of art."

Frame's work has been shown in many museums, including the National Academy of Design, The San Francisco Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Palm Springs Desert Museum, the Phoenix Art Museum, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the deYoung Museum in San Francisco, among others.

Robert Frame died on December 6, 1999, in Santa Barbara, California.