I’d like to see it from the other side, so that we could watch the trainer/handler too.

At the Lampang Elephant center in Thailand, they train the elephants to paint.  They stand out of sight of the camera, but if they guide the elephant, its through some kind of signaling to its head.  Most elephants paint abstractly, perhaps without meaning, but it appears as though a couple may be trained to replicate a shape. In the below videos, you can see more clearly the trainer’s signals. Gorillas, like Koko,  and chimps also paint, and occassonaly use sign language to tell us that the painting represents birds, or even emotions. Elephants don’t have adequate language centers to convey similar info.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=3oYYXfM1Jw0&feature=related
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ajM-9OIu1Ow

They also spontaneously play music on giant instruments created for them.  The first is from National Geographic:
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0510/feature5/audio.html
http://mulatta.org/mp3s/Ganesha.mp3

Here’s info I found online; it was funded by grants from the World Wildlife Foundation:
The Lampang Elephant Conservation Center managed by the Forest Industry Organization is under the government Ministry of Agriculture and Cooperatives. The Center’s main concerns are to sustainably conserve Thai elephants, to protect and to provide them with veterinary care, to support responsible development of eco-tourism and to take care of auspicious elephants known as “changpuak” or white elephants. In Tourism circles, the Thai Elephant Conservation Center received an award from the Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) in 1998. The center has many activities in which elephants play a part which visitors can watch such as training elephants to draw and to play musical instruments.
The drawing activity at the Thai Elephant Conservation Center was introduced and later supported by Nancy Abraham, Richard Lair and Alex Meiarmid of a team who developed the Asian Elephant Art and Conservation Project in New York USA. Selected elephants have been trained there since 1997 and mahouts are closely involved with this activity. The drawing instruments are paints brushes, paper or cloth. Elephants are able to draw because of their flexible trunks which can clasp a brush that has been dipped into the paint by the mahout. Then, the elephants paint on the paper or cloth using their imagination. The colors are selected by the individual mahout.

I’m starting to think this stuff is real Let me tell you- as someone who has worked with elephants for more than a decade, I really felt like I had to shift my thinking a bit after seeing this. Forget about all this “self-aware” stuff. I think that’s all semantics. If this stuff is real then the elephants ability to be trained on a very acute behavior is beyond my usual understanding of them. Many of my elephant trainer/keeper friends also feel the same way I do. It sort of turns things on their head. The very nature of the physical task alone is remarkable. Most people could not do so well. I’ve seen elephants pick up dimes and pull sunflower seeds from small holes, but this sort of sustained activity seems so complex and focused, it starts to make me think that the elephant may indeed “understand” what it is doing on some level- or perhaps may understand what it is it is painting.  I sill don’t know.

As a re-seller of elephant paintings who has spent hundreds of hours with the painting elephants of Northern Thailand, let me reassure you, elephants that paint are very real.

Humans may guide the elephants by VOICE telling them such things as left, right, up, down and stop and may touch (NOT guide, just touch) the elephant painter to reassure the creature but the painting is a matter of route learning by the elephant itself.

Elephants have been taught to paint amazing real life paintings. Paintings abstracts is natural for them.

Use of colors is solely the elephant handlers choice as it has not been fully proven but elephants are purportedly color blind.

So folks, painting elephants are definitely NOT a hoax - paintings a wonderful reminder that humans are not the only thinking creatures on Earth!

Elephants are known to be very intelligent with long-term memories, and to be self-aware.  I also see no reason to be doubtful that with training these amazing critters can paint these images and do many other complex tasks.

Totally agree.  They are amazing - lovable creatures.