Cinematically inclined painters (and online sharability) give an old medium a jolt of new life in these motion-painting videos. We like to think that frizzy-haired PBS painter Bob Ross is smiling down from heaven.

Rinpa Eshidan’s Room
Japanese art collective Rinpa Eshidan proves its mastery of this process-driven medium with works such as Room, a theatrical, high-energy, ever-morphing (at times sculptural) piece set to a soundtrack of bass-heavy techno and Eastern-inspired folk.

David Ellis’s Daily
In Daily, Brooklyn-based painter and video artist David Ellis is a modern-day Pollock—his action painting alive with undulating forms, scribbles, and abstractions.

David Ellis and Barnstormers’ Letter to the President
Ellis takes up with some like-minded New York– and Tokyo-based painters, directing them in this fast-paced, highly graphic plea for peace.

Adam Bruneau’s Motion Painting Number Two
A YouTuber pays tribute to Oskar Fischinger—the early-twentieth-century German filmmaker whose 1947 Motion Painting No. 1 inspired the medium in both name and technique.

ARTVSTS vs. PFT Motion Painting
It’s a paint-off—Singapore-based street-art collective ARTVSTS (a slangy take on "art activists") does what it does best.

Related:

• Archive: “Movie Features”
• Articles by Rachel Wolff
• Table of Contents: November 19, 2007 issue of New York | Subscribe!