Born into a music oriented family, David Ellis of the Bay Area, is influenced by a variety of sounds and active performances, is a performance, video and installation artist who creates canvases with "watery, gyrating swirls of paint." (Wolff) Often, while he is painting, he is being filmed going through the processes, which is dubbed "motion painting'. One of his stop-frame animations has about 25,000 shots condensed into an eight minute video.

Indeed his childhood music experiences seem to carry over into his creative work, which is an interpretation on canvas of music and sound. "Like jazz, these works provide Ellis with an opportunity to combine ideas with collaborators or work solo within a form that promotes improvisation and spontaneity.

For a recent commission the artist painted a truck from sunup to sundown over five consecutive days. Ellis often stages events when exhibiting his motion paintings, inviting musicians, performers, and sound artists to interpret the work live. His motion painting, Paint on Trucks in a World in Need of Love was recently exhibited at MOMA." (Ellis)
He also uses player piano technology to make a series of musical and animated sculptural pieces. However, unlike the traditional ragtime of that kind of music, he does dances that are described as "steam punk beats".

Sources:
www.freshwatercatfish.org/
Rachel Wolff, "Winged Victory", ARTnews, June 2008, p. 40
http://www.neublack.com/art-design/david-ellis-the-owl/