Pooch master painter

       In her Brooklyn studio the artist stretches, gazes passionately - then plunges her teeth through the canvas.So begins another masterpiece by Tillamook Cheddar, or Tillie, a Jack Russell terrier some see as rivalling the big beasts of the two-legged contemporary art world.
       Switching from teeth to claws, Tillie scratches intensely at the paper, covered with vellum lathered in scarlet paint,and protected by Mylar film.
       Occasionally she pauses to examine her work. Her body trembles with excitement, eyes shine, tongue lolls. Then with a growl and a bark she's off again,tearing, scratching, licking.
       Sometimes frenzied, sometimes in a trance, she appears oblivious to an entourage of six humans, including a sculptor and painter, and two dogs.
       After about 20 minutes, owner Bowman Hastie, who describes himself as the artist's assistant, snatches the work to safety.
       The Mylar and vellum sheets are removed, revealing an unequal storm of red lines raging across the canvas.
       The visiting artists, who've never seen Tillie in action, are awestruck.
       "She seemed possessed. It was scary,"gasps Juan Doe, a painter and comic book illustrator."The piece," he says,surveying the still wet paper,"is awesome. It looks like two human lungs,"an astonished Ward Yoshimoto, who sculpts and works as a commercial photographer, exclaims.
       The 10-year-old pooch, named after Hastie's favourite childhood cheese, has built a career that New York's army of struggling artists could only dream of matching.
       She has collaborated with major established artists including Tom Sachs and Jon Kessler of the US.
       Her paintings, which sell for more than $1,000(34,000 baht), just had a

solo show in Florida and are now part of an animal art exhibition in Ottawa. In October, Yoshimoto and Doe are including her alongside human painters when a gallery they run shows at a Paris art fair.
       But is Tillie an artist? Or does she just enjoy savaging paint-covered paper?
       Not everyone thinks the canny canine should swap her kennel for an atelier.New York's Village Voice newspaper pithily labelled Tillie "a sham".
       Fans point out that Tillie's work strongly resembles the output of human conceptualists selling canvasses for a million dollars, or far more, at major auctions.
       Her works have been likened to those of abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock and the surrealist school of automatic drawing in which experimental artists tried to express their subconscious.
       Hastie,40, is not an artist and says he stumbled across Tillie's mania for scratch-painting when she was a puppy and began tearing at a yellow legal pad.
       As Tillie rose to become top dog in the growing world of animal art - which includes painter elephants, chimpanzees and turtles - Hastie realised something special was happening.
       Renowned Belgian artist Wim Delvoye told him Tillie compared favourably to Cy Twombly from the US, a favourite at Sotheby's and Christies auctions.
       "It's like Twombly", Hastie recalls Delvoye saying when he saw his first Tillie,"only it's better than Twombly!"
       What's clear is that the white-bodied terrier enjoys art, while most other dogs,including her own six puppies, do not.
       Doe,36, said Tillie's intense concentration closely resembled "the dreamlike state" artists aspire to when diving into imaginative worlds.
       "I'm almost jealous. I have to work so hard to prepare everything in life to get where I can concentrate like that," Doe said."She is so intense."
       Yoshimoto,49, said Tillie was more focused than half the students he saw while studying art at Brooklyn College.
       Her paintings, he said, are consistently interesting."I'd say you'd put them up anywhere and no one would ever say a thing, not in any museum in the world."
       Hastie, an editor and writer, said Tillie's ability often made human art aficionados uncomfortable, perhaps because her work does so closely resemble the more rambling efforts of expensive artists.
       "Some suspect that this is a ploy on my part to subvert the art world," he said.
       "People don't buy a painting based on what it looks like. They want to have something by a genius and no one wants to say a dog is a genius."
       Tillie's own views remain a mystery.She took time to calm down after the ecstasy of the painting process. Her body still shook as Hastie fed her a morsel of chicken.
       Then, while the humans debated her level of genius, she settled onto a sofa,burying her nose into a ragged soft toy.
       There she lay, immobile, staring into space. Perhaps thinking of great things to come. Perhaps not.