Ellis's career is one of the longest-running working lives of any twentieth-century New Mexican painter, more than six decades of nearly continuous work in and around Santa Fe, from the founding of Los Cinco Pintores through the consolidation of the Southwestern landscape tradition and into its postwar afterlife.
Ellis came to art with no advantages of education or family money. The household he grew up in, his father a travelling dentist who also ran small theatres, his mother a hat designer, moved frequently across the West, and he received only the briefest of formal schooling before his education came to depend on his mother's instruction and his own reading. He began painting at about twelve, found that he could draw and paint well, and had his first exhibition while still a teenager.
His father's insistence that he train for a profession produced a brief and unsuccessful career as an optometrist, but a visit to friends in Santa Fe in his early twenties gave him a setting and a community in which serious painting was possible, and he made the decision to settle there permanently. The Santa Fe he arrived in was a small but intellectually electric place, and the influx of younger painters into the city was producing the conditions for a new American art colony.
The founding of Los Cinco Pintores placed him at the center of that emergence. The group's manifesto announced their commitment to bringing modern art directly to the public of Santa Fe, and they put the principle into practice by living together near the Camino del Monte Sol, sharing studios, and exhibiting their work in venues accessible to the local community rather than to the East Coast art world. Their five-year run was short but unusually consequential: more than any other single force, the painters of Los Cinco Pintores shaped the Santa Fe art world's self-image as a place of working artists organized around a shared modernist sensibility.
After the group disbanded, Ellis settled into the long, steady working life that would occupy him for the next six decades. His mature painting concentrated on the New Mexican landscape, the Sangre de Cristos, the Jemez, the high desert in summer storm and winter snow, the small villages and acequias of the upper Rio Grande, rendered with an Impressionist-derived attention to color and atmosphere and a formal solidity inherited from late nineteenth-century American landscape practice. His subjects sometimes extended outside New Mexico, but the body of his work is essentially a sustained study of the northern New Mexican high country across the changing decades of the twentieth century.
The recognition that came over the long course of his career was substantial without being clamorous. He was respected within the broader American Western and Southwestern painting world, his work was acquired steadily by regional museums, and the gold medal from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in 1975 marked his place within a particular American tradition of land-based painting. He died in Virginia City, Montana, the town of his birth, at the age of eighty-seven, the last of Los Cinco Pintores still living.