David Helm Elliott was born in Lubbock, Texas, in 1945, and grew up in Plainview, in the heart of the Texas Panhandle. When he was about six years old, he found a Golden Book history of the United States and was fascinated by the pictures of the battles of Bunker Hill and Gettysburg. He was amazed and delighted that pictures could do so much and he started to draw pictures of his own. He's been at it ever since.

Growing Up
Elliott’s first artistic influence was his grandmother, Ida Harrington Stovall (1885-1943) who died before he was born. She was an academically trained and accomplished landscape painter and her paintings of the Panhandle hung in his home as well as in other homes around town, and so Elliott grew up seeing painting as a normal part of life, not as some remote or exotic activity.

The 1960s and 1970s
Elliott went from Plainview to Austin where he attended the University of Texas and became part of a lively and independent scene that grew out of the mayhem that was Austin in the 1960s. He studied under some remarkable artists like William Lester and Everett Spruce, both members of the Dallas Nine, a group of more than nine painters, printmakers and sculptors that first emerged in the1940s. Their paintings projected an “intensely subjective approach to the landscapes and other subject matter around them with an American Scene and surrealistic aesthetic.” He also took courses from the well-known figurative painter Robert Levers and the eminent photographer Russell Lee.

During his sophomore summer, in 1966, he lived in the Coyoacan section of Mexico City, taking classes in Spanish and Mexican folk art and architecture.

1970s and 80s
After getting his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, he hit the road, visiting Belize and Europe and living in England for about a year. For part of the time there, he was the assistant to the keeper of applied arts at the Laing Gallery, a regional museum in Newcastle. At another point, he spent several months in Ft. Worth, where he worked as a preparator, installing the original collection at the then-new Kimball Museum.

But he always came back to Austin and he kept painting everyday.

1990s
For two years in Washington, D.C., he studied under the painter Stanley Lewis while attending American University. Living in DC gave Elliott the opportunity to spend countless hours at the National Gallery, the Corcoran, the National Museum of American Art and the Phillips Collection. He received a Master’s in Fine Arts in 1993 and when he returned to Austin, he resumed his habit of getting up very early and painting before going to teach at Austin Community College. He became more and more productive during this time, and he also began to see his work as part of that same movement of American homegrown abstraction from which his teachers came.

2000s
Today Elliott still gets up and paints each morning, doing pretty much the same thing as when he started—trying to create something as exciting as those two pictures in the Golden Book.

Shows
Elliott has been included in numerous group exhibitions and two one-man shows.
His work is collected by private collectors and several museum collections have his paintings.