Jack Russells can do just about anything, but I've never heard of one who earned his keep, that is until Tillamook Cheddar.
Stepping back from the sheet of paper before her, Tillie the artist cocks her head, surveys her work, then launches into a frenzy of finishing touches. No one minds that she appears to be making a dog’s breakfast of her latest assignment.
As the world’s pre-eminent canine painter, the ten-year-old Jack Russell terrier — full name Tillamook Cheddar — has clawed her way up to become something of a big cheese in the art world.
Notching up her 20th solo exhibition, she has earned more than $100,000 from sales of her work, visited five countries and drawn comparisons with the abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock.
“If you put her work before someone without telling them that a dog did it, they wouldn’t be able to tell it apart from a human artist’s,” said Jane Hart, curator of the Hollywood Art and Culture Centre in Hollywood, Florida.
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Her owner, F. Bowman Hastie III, of Brooklyn, New York, gets her started by rubbing paint from an oil-stick on to vellum, taping it colour-side down on to lithograph paper and laying a sheet of protective plastic film on top. Tillie then sets to work, scratching and biting at the vellum through the plastic, the pressure of her claws, paws and teeth transferring the coloured pigment on to the paper below.