Copyright © Richard Ellis
Photo courtesy of Richard Ellis
Richard Ellis is currently recognized as the foremost painter of marine natural history subjects in America. His paintings of whales have appeared in Audubon, National Wildlife, Australian Geographic, the Encyclopedia Britannica, and numerous other national and international publications. His shark paintings have been featured in Sports Afield, Audubon, Sport Diver, Nautical Quarterly, Reader's Digest, and of course his own Book Of Sharks, now in its sixth printing, and called the most popular book on sharks ever written. He has been asked to advise on many museum installations, and in 1978, he completed a 35-foot long whale mural for the Denver Museum of Natural History. His paintings have been exhibited at one-man and group shows from coast to coast. One hundred and six of his paintings were selected by the Smithsonian Institution to form a traveling exhibit of the marine mammals of the world, and these paintings are now in the permanent collection of Whaleworld, a museum in Albany, Western Australia.
In addition to painting, Mr. Ellis is the author of more than a hundred magazine articles and book reviews, which have appeared in such journals as Geo, Audubon, Animal Kingdom, Curator, Smithsonian, Science Digest, and National Geographic. He has been the subject of cover stories in American Artist, Ocean Realm, Yale's Discovery magazine, and his alumni magazine, the Pennsylvania Gazette. He has appeared in numerous television specials, and has written screenplays on whales for PBS. His research has taken him to Quebec, Baja California, Newfoundland, Hawaii, Bermuda, Nantucket, the Azores, Alaska, Patagonia, Japan, India, South Africa, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Iceland, the Faeroes, the Galpagos, the Falklands, South Georgia, the Antarctic, Spitsbergen, Jan Mayen Land, and the North Pole.
Mr. Ellis is a special adviser to the American Cetacean Society, and a member of the Explorers Club. From 1980 to 1990, he was a member of the U.S. delegation to the International Whaling Commission. Upon the 1980 publication of The Book Of Whales, he embarked on a national lecture tour, which took him from Boston to Hawaii. Dolphins And Porpoises, the second volume of his comprehensive work on the cetaceans of the world, was published to universal critical acclaim in 1982. As of September 1986, he completed a 100-foot-long mural of Moby Dick for the New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts, and in April of 1987, his illustrations of the seals and sea lions of the world were published by the National Geographic. In the summer of 1987, Richard Ellis lectured aboard the legendary Sea Cloud for six weeks as she sailed from Bali to Fiji. In 1991, he published Great White Shark, co-authored by John McCosker, (Stanford University Press), and Men And Whales, published by Knopf. In 1993, he wrote and illustrated Physty, his first children's book, the story of the successful rescue of a baby sperm whale. Monsters Of The Sea was published in the fall of 1994, and Deep Atlantic appeared in 1996. Imagining Atlantis was published in July, 1998, with front page reviews in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times book reviews, and The Search For The Giant Squid will be published in October 1998. He is currently writing and illustrating an encyclopedia of the sea. He lives in New York City.
Biographical information provided by Richard Ellis.
Richard Ellis
17 E. 16th Street
New York, NY 10003
