I saw some clips on youtube of elephants painting some fairly impressive things. There were mutiple clips of an elephant painting a line drawing of an elephant holding a flower; one of an elephant painting a mother elephant and her young from behind; also, lots of pretty impressionistic landscapes and pictures of flowers. The paintings were well-composed and seemed to have real artistic merit. However, all of the clips were shot in a similar fashion, with the camera aimed very close to the trunk, meaning you could not see what the animal’s trainer-who was usually standing next to the elephant-was doing. He could have been cueing with gestures or words. Also, there were a few paintings that employed color in a very impressive manner-appropriate and visually pleasing color combos-which is nice, except that I have been told that scientists believe that elephants have rather poor vision and can probably only see two colors.
So, does anyone know anything about this? Is this a big hoax? Even if you just know some random facts on elephant intelligence, I’d be interested (yes, I already read Cecil’s answer concerning elephant memories).
No, they are trained to make certain motions just as a dog is trained to bark on command. They make the same basic print each time (as best they can).
Can you tell me how or where you learned that? I’m very curious about this.
My parents bought a painting in Thailand after watching the elephant create it. It was the ‘flower’ motif. They thought it was a fun souvenir, but realised that the elephant was simply going through a series of trained moves. It did several paintings in a row, and they were pretty much the same.
Which is quite impressive in itself, you don’t see dogs and cats painting pictures of themselves*. I wonder if a dog could be trained to do something like that if they had the paws for it.
- Despite what Burton Silver would have you believe ;).
A couple of previous threads on this:
So… what about this elephant painting a self-portrait?
One of those threads had a post by someone who had seen it first hand.
On the other hand, if you just give an elephant a brush and paints, it will amuse itself by producing non-representational art without any human prodding.
Is that more in the line of Monkeys in front of a typewriter or are there examples of art that humans would judge as having some organization?
Don’t you just mean “post-modern” art? 
Was that the guy who published that Cats Painting book? Almost had me fooled there for awhile…
Isn’t the test whether other elephants would recognize it as having some sort of organization?
Quite. Elephants are very intelligent creatures and would doubtless argue that representational art has had nothing new to say for centuries. They can be coerced into it through crass commercialism, but that’s not where their natural inclination lies.
I remember reading about one painting elephant; she saw a fire truck go by with its lights flashing, became very excited, and painted a composition with lots of red flashy-shapes in it.
Well, the ones I’ve seen have been pretty random, but I’ve seen worse from some humans who call themselves artists.
I am unclear. The OP says the elephants have poor eyesight. So, let’s be clear about this. Do the elephants have poor vision, or is it the scientists? 
I don’t know for sure, and, from what I have read, scientists don’t either. After all, it’s not like you can just ask them. But the idea I got from the things I’ve seen and read is that some scientists believe that elephants 1) have limited color vision, perhaps seeing in as few as only two different colors, and 2) have generally poor vision, with dubious focus.
The limited color thing makes it seem pretty obvious that the landscapes the animals were painting were the result of rigorous training, with the trainers cueing the elephants whenever they wanted it to put down the brush and ‘ask’ for another color with their trunks, rather than the elephant making a decision on its own. But I don’t know what evidence has lead scientists to believe that they can’t see more than two colors. In fact, I only heard this suggested once, and have been unable to find anything on the interwebs that supports it. All that I find when I google elephant vision are vague statements like ‘elephant vision is mediocore’ or ‘moderate at best’.
I did find a sight full of alleged elephant paintings that were much more plausible, as they all looked like the squiggly fingerpainting of a toddler, at elephantartgallery.com. These paintings are multicolored. Unfortunately, this site doesn’t have any videos of the elephants making the paintings, so I have no idea if the elephants actually chose to use mutiple colors independently, or were simply being prodded by humans to switch colors periodically.
The folks at the Elephant Art Gallery have endeavored to give all of the paintings names such as ‘Ever Mindful’, ‘Jungle in Moonlight’, and ‘The Intensity of Dreams’, which I find fairly hilarious.
Very interesting threads, and the second one really covered most of the things I was wondering about–except for the eyesight thing. In fact, it mentions an elephant who seemed to enjoy painting the colors that it saw in nearby people’s clothes. I really wish I could remember where I heard or read the suggestion that they had limited color vision.
Most mammals have only two types of color receptors in their eyes, while humans and some primates have three types, and birds have four types of color receptors (wikipedia and scientific papers cited by that article).
That’s the one. He also wrote The Kama Sutra for Cats which is a bit of a survival guide for cats who have to deal with various rhythmic motions of their bed.