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When motion pictures were new, at the turn of the 20th century, a director at Edison’s studios made a short film showing an artist working at an easel. His painting of the sun lifted off the canvas and overheated the room until he was able to capture it and dunk it in a bucket of water. The theme is as ancient as the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea: artist creates an image and the static image comes to life.

That 1904 film, “Animated Painting,” shares a title and a bit of its conceptual underpinning with a new exhibition at the San Diego Museum of Art. The show gathers two dozen works of animation by 13 international artists and one collective who, in the most basic terms, combine multiple still frames to create the illusion of movement. The artists -- from Spain, South Africa, Thailand, England, China, Germany, Argentina, the Netherlands and the U.S. -- expand broadly upon that simple definition of animation, while staying true to a deeper sense of the word (investing something with life, soul, mind) and aspiring to capture its metaphorical power.

Takeshi Murata’s five-minute loop begins with a single throbbing pink dot that gives way to a phantasmagoric, painterly, pixelated riff on Sylvester Stallone as Rambo. At the more meditative end of the spectrum, Ann Lislegaard’s “Bellona (after Samuel R. Delany)” sends viewers through an enigmatic labyrinth of luminous, ever-changing hues.

“I wanted to stay away from Pixar and Disney image code and the languages they developed through cartooning,” curator Betti-Sue Hertz said of organizing the show. “I wanted artists who were linked to deeper tradition. I was less interested in narrative and storytelling per se than in the moving image as a somatic experience. I was interested in how animation had been filtering slowly into the contemporary art scene, so I chose people who were active in that sphere, who identify as contemporary artists rather than animators.”

Many, but not all of the artists use digital software that has become as common an image-making tool as a pencil or paintbrush, Hertz said.

“Animation in the commercial industry and mainstream media is permeating everything, more and more. If you turn the TV on, pretty much every commercial is a combination of live action and animation. It’s in the mainstream culture on a daily basis, and artists are saying, ‘What can I do with these techniques, these technologies? How can I push them into a more subtle language?’ ”

While the influence of popular media is evident throughout the show -- as it is throughout contemporary art in general -- so is the influence of Abstract Expressionism, mural painting, graffiti, Light and Space art, and surrealism.

The show includes an equal number of straight projections and installation works, pieces where imagery is projected onto multiple surfaces and unusual structures. Julian Opie’s schematic images of walking figures appear on LED film boxes mounted in the museum’s front parking lot. Wit Pimkanchanapong’s 21-second animation, “Test Sequence,” plays in one gallery, while the 8,000 printed sheets of paper that went into the making of the film hang from the ceiling throughout the show like a scalloped canopy, an unbound flip book.

With artists addressing alienation, violence, spectacle, gender issues, politics and history, the show becomes, said Hertz, “a map of issues and ideas and concerns that are flowing through contemporary society.” It aims to be provocative, but also highly accessible.

Drawing on the everyday

Imagery might at first seem familiar, like something seen on television or online. “But as you stay with the work and consider what it’s saying back to you,” Hertz said, “you have a different experience than what you initially thought you would. It doesn’t take long to sense that this work is not like ‘The Simpsons’ or ‘Fantasia.’ But it’s not unlike them. It’s abstracted.”

The artists, she continued, adopt animation techniques “and push the envelope in terms of what they can do that ‘fine art’ has always aspired to -- deep feeling, refinement, sensitivity, social critique.”

Self-reflexivity is another attribute of art that often plays a dominant role in animation. The medium not only brings static imagery to life but often makes the process of transformation visible. William Kentridge, at 52 the patriarch of the current crop of artists using animation (nearly all in the show are in their 30s and 40s), originally turned to film in order to record the stages of his charcoal drawings as they evolved. In his animations, history operates at every level: Images on paper appear, shift and transmute as personal, political and fictional stories unfold.

The exhibition features his 2003 film “Tide Table,” an introspective, often lyrical work with a dark undercurrent. Additions and erasures make for fluid interplay between action, imagination, representation and memory. That interplay deepens and destabilizes the sense of reality.

Kentridge’s legacy is evident in the work of fellow South African Robin Rhode, who mixes stop-motion live action and hand drawing to poetic effect, and also in the “motion paintings” of the Barnstormers, an ever-shifting collective counting roughly 30 members.

The group’s founder, David Ellis, initially turned to film in art school, to record, like Kentridge, the evolution of his individual works.

“I filmed myself painting, because I would notoriously never finish a work, just keep changing it. As long as I’ve been making paintings, I’ve been painting over them. Originally it was because materials were expensive and I like to try different ideas out. I would bring home a finished painting from school and give it to my mother as a Christmas gift. The next year, while I was home for a few days, I would paint over the painting.”

His mother, he said laughing, would be furious, but Ellis felt vindicated when he came upon a quote by Picasso asserting that a painting is never finished. “If it’s finished, it’s dead,” Ellis said. “I’m just striving to find the unfinished thing, and dragging my friends into it.”

In 1999, he brought a few dozen friends to his hometown of Cameron, N.C., to expand upon an expressive stunt he conducted as a teenager: covering the sides of tobacco barns with painting inspired by the subway art of New York City. The following year, Ellis reconvened the group and filmed the weeklong making and remaking of a giant floor mural in his Brooklyn studio. He mounted a camera on the ceiling and, using time-lapse video, recorded as each artist painted the floor with patterns, images and words, improvising off the work of the last.

“It reminded me of when I was an aspiring breaker,” Ellis said. “Like B-boys, everyone was standing around waiting to do their thing, or jazz musicians trading off doing solos.”

“Watching Paint Dry” was the first of the group’s five motion paintings (the term recycled from its use a century ago by artist and experimental filmmaker Oskar Fischinger). “Letter to the President” (2003) took its impetus from the mounting possibility of war in Iraq and Ellis’ memory of a childhood school assignment. The work, he said, is a letter in visual form, aimed “to harness some of the emotions we were having at the time. It was a very charged atmosphere.”

The film begins with the 9-year-old daughter of one of the artists writing an actual letter, telling the president that her family didn’t want a war. “Then her father painted over it and more and more artists [followed]. We ended the film but unfortunately the war wasn’t stopped.”

Imagery in the Barnstormers’ work is in a constant state of metamorphosis. The films end when each artist has had a turn or when a hosting institution declares their time is up. But as far as Ellis is concerned, the works “are never finished, even the ones that act like they’re finished. They’re meant to keep going.”

The group’s installation at SDMA consists of a 12-foot-high tobacco barn with walls built of rear-projection screen material. A different motion painting is projected onto each surface so that imagery covers the entire structure.

A multimedia approach

While some animations derive exclusively from drawn imagery and others from live footage, yet others combine the work of the hand, computer and camera to create idiosyncratic visual styles. Spanish artist Ruth Gomez based her short, vivid animation “Animales de Compania” on digitally retouched photographs and live-action footage. The looping chase sequence between well-dressed members of the human food chain is a graphically compelling hybrid, concocted as well as oddly convincing.

Bay Area artist Kota Ezawa is represented by a one-minute animation that joins the flatness and simplified palette of a cartoon with significant, recognizable historical imagery. “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” begins with a sepia-toned version of Lincoln’s assassination, adapted from D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film, “The Birth of a Nation.” Ezawa’s film then switches to soft blues, pinks and grays as it re-creates Abraham Zapruder’s famous footage of the Kennedy assassination.

After choosing source material, Ezawa (who has also used footage of the reading of the O.J. Simpson verdict and other cultural milestones) begins a process of translation. He isolates key images from the chosen footage, draws them on a computer screen, then brings them back into motion.

“I don’t animate each frame,” he said. “The idea is to make it as simple as possible to make the image or movement identifiable.”

Ezawa traces the influences in his work to his mixed German and Japanese heritage. Growing up in “colorless” Germany likely led to his inclination toward a muted palette. And the pared-down aspect of his animations relates, he explains, to Noh theater, where “the simplification of movement allows an impact you don’t get from realistic images.”

Ezawa’s work derives as well from conceptual and theoretical concerns that have coursed through art in the last few decades, namely the relationship between original and copy, the way collective memory varies, and how we perceive and process visual information.

Such subjects aren’t the stuff of animation as we commonly know it.

“Living in this culture, I see it as my job not to add to the mainstream but to show different functions animation can have,” Ezawa said. “It’s just as worthwhile to show something shocking or tragic in animation.

“Animation is a huge field. In the U.S., the field is really dominated by companies like Disney, but worldwide it’s really not that way. It’s only in the Western world that animation has the function of entertainment.”

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‘Animated Painting’

Where: San Diego Museum of Art, 1450 El Prado, Balboa Park, San Diego

Ends: Jan. 13

Price: $10

Contact: (619) 232-7931 or www.sdmart.org