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, who knows because she has tried it.

The gallery is the latest to put the dog’s output on show, with an exhibition entitled The Tillamook Cheddar Mid-Career Retrospective, 1999-2009. Footage of the artist at work appears on a television screen, showing visitors the techniques behind her compositions.

Her works might be mistaken for a toddler’s first accidental encounter with crayons but they have given critics something to chew on. One commended her images as “a masterpiece of conceptualism”. She has also been dubbed a “doggie da Vinci”.

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.

It is, in the words of the exhibition notes, “a methodic ritual marked by dramatic shifts in tempo and intensity. The resulting sharp and intersecting lines complement the artist’s delicate paw prints and subtle tongue impressions, composing an expressionistic image that is revealed on the paper beneath.”

Her pieces, which sell for between $100 (£60) and $2,000, have titles such as King Lear, Ekaterina Maximova and The 18 Saints of Tillamook Cheddar.

Ms Hart insists that Tillie’s art raises “compelling questions”. “It’s not like putting a paint brush in an elephant’s trunk and watching it just smoosh paint around. Tillie steps back and considers her work, then does some more. She works with pieces for over an hour ... There’s something very refined about what she does.”

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