Toddler fools the art world into buying his tomato ketchup paintings
Last updated at 22:23 03 December 2007
To the untrained eye, they appear to be simple daubs that could have been created by a two year old. Which is precisely what they are.
But that didn't stop the supposed experts falling over themselves to acclaim them.
The toddler in question is Freddie Linsky, who has fooled the art world into buying and asking to exhibit his paintings.
Freddie's efforts, which include works using tomato ketchup composed while sitting on his high chair, were posted by his mother Estelle Lovatt on collector Charles Saatchi's online gallery.
She claimed her son was an art critic and and a familiar face at major exhibitions, and added ludicrously overblown captions to his offerings.
One creation of random red and green splodges called Sunrise was captioned: "A bold use of colour. Inspired by the 'plein air' habit of painting by Monet, drawing on the natural world that surrounds us all."
And his black scrawlings in a work entitled The Best Loved Elephant are captioned:
"The striking use of oriental calligraphy has the kanji-like characters stampeding from the page, showing the new ascent of the East. It is one of Linsky's most experimental works."
Freddie is said to favour the "spot and blotch" technique pioneered by the American abstract expressionism movement in the 1950s.
The young artist is said on Saatchi Online to have "dedicated his whole life to art".
His mother wrote: "Freddie W R Linsky paints over and over, making us curious to know what is going on.
"It seems that one stroke is being repeated - the same stroke or one very close to it, hence the possibility of the infinite opening up of the structure of time."
