MORE than a decade after Charles Saatchi championed the talents of Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, a young British artist is creating a buzz on the collector’s online gallery.

Freddie WR Linsky is known to some for his “grasshopper-like strokes”, to others for his “spot and blotch” primitivism. To his mother he is simply Freddie, a two-year-old toddler.

Freddie has duped the art world by selling his work on the adult section of Saatchi Online. His initial efforts were edible rather than Munch: his first medium was tomato ketchup, as he scrawled on the table of his high chair.

“Not since Titian has a single particular colour had such an effect on me,” the gallery quotes Freddie as saying of the paint used in his work Leonard III. “If Titian used blood for his reds, then surely sunshine was used for this yellow.”

The description underneath one work, The Best Loved Elephant, says: “The striking use of oriental calligraphy has the kanji-like characters stampeding from the page, showing the new ascent of the East. One of the artist’s most experimental works.”

It was enough to chalk up Freddie’s first sale, to a Manchester artist and collector, for £20. But the captions are composed by Freddie’s mother, Estelle Lovatt, a lecturer at Hampstead School of Art and freelance art critic.

Lovatt said last week: “It was all meant to be tongue in cheek and I thought people would figure it out, but then Freddie got an e-mail from a gallery in Berlin asking whether he would be willing to exhibit, and now he has sold one of his paintings.”

A spokeswoman for Saatchi Online said the virtual gallery was intended to give artists the freedom to exhibit their work as they liked. Freddie is the youngest of 75,000 artists who show their work and sell at prices from a few pounds to many thousands. This year it will generate £50m in sales.

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