Artistic Elephants Paint Self Portraits

Here is an amazing video at YouTube that shows an elephant painting a portrait using its trunk to manipulate the brush. The pachyderm starts with a clean canvas, and finishes with what could be described as a self-portrait. Heck, it’s certainly better than anything I have painted recently!

You can watch another video of a baby elephant painting at this YouTube.com link.

It’s really amazing! This article at GreenMuze describes The Asian Elephant Art & Conservation Project (AEACP) was founded in 1997 as a unique charitable program developed to help raise awareness about the plight of endangered Asian elephants and to help make the lives of domesticated elephants a little better. The revenue generated from their paintings is used to care for the elephants and provide them with better food, improved shelter, and proper veterinary care. The AEACP has received attention and support from around the globe.  The AEACP’s work with elephants has been featured in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Nation and Esquire, as well as featured on CBS Sunday Morning, the Lehrer NewsHour, and a substantial segment on 60 Minutes.

According to an article at the BBC news,  the giant mammals even had an exhibition of their paintings at an Edinburgh Gallery in 1996. According to Victoria Khunapramot, who imported the paintings from Thailand, “They are very intelligent animals and create the entire paintings with great gusto and concentration within just five or 10 minutes.

“They are trained by artists who fine-tune their skills, and they paint in front of an audience in their conservation village, leaving no one in any doubt that they are authentic elephant creations. The only thing they cannot do on their own is pick up a paintbrush, so it gets handed to them.” They are gently trained to paint abstract designs, flowers, and elephant portraits.

The Asian Elephant Art & Conservation Project (AEACP) promotes and distributes the work of elephant artists to raise funds for elephant conservation.  By exhibiting and marketing the paintings internationally, the AEACP aims to increase public awareness of the plight of Asian elephants whose numbers are dwindling at an alarming rate.  In recent years, the number of domesticated elephants in Thailand alone has rapidly diminished from 11,000 to only 3,000.

Additionally, deforestation of the Thai countryside has led to a ban on the logging of teak, an industry that once employed thousands of elephants. The logging ban left these domesticated elephants and their life-long owners (mahouts) without a livelihood.

Find out more about these magnificent animals or to purchase artwork from the Asian Elephant Art & Conservation Project, visit www.elephantart.com.

Tags: Animals, conservation