Emerging artist alert: have you seen the paintings of Cholla? Abstracts, primarily. Watercolours for the most part.

Stunning. I'm no expert on the visual arts, but it seems to me Cholla's canvases positively resonate with glimmers of A.Y. Jackson and Lawren Harris.

But don't take my word for it - ask John Yimin. He IS an expert. He's a California art lover and an art critic - and he's absolutely smitten with the works of the painting phenomenon. "The brush strokes Cholla uses to get his vision down on paper," writes Yimin, "the watercolours' dance...and especially the fascinating completion of the works...grabs me and holds me with the fire of Pollock and the fixed gaze of Resnick."

High praise for an artist who's only 23 years old with decades of creativity stretching out before him like the Woodbine racetrack.

And Cholla appears to be embracing his destiny at full gallop. Already he's been a featured guest on Martha Stewart's television show. He's also had exhibitions in San Francisco and New York.

Best of all, for those of us who lack the deep pockets of major art collectors, Cholla's works are still fairly affordable. You can pick up some of his earlier works for as for as little as $900 U.S. Even his best canvases seldom fetch more than $2500:00. But my advice would be - hurry. Cholla's got a landscape called The Big Red Buck that will soon be featured in an art show called Arte Laguna in Mogliano Veneto, Italy. Once his work gets international recognition his prices are bound to go supernova. Yep. Major shows in U.S. galleries. National exposure on television. An upcoming gig at one of the most prestigious art exhibitions in Europe...

Not bad. For a horse.

Yes, Cholla is of the equine persuasion. A coppercoloured buckskin mustang/quarterhorse cross born on a Nevada ranch in 1985. Cholla might have spent his life rounding up confused little dogies and absentminded cows had not his owner, an amateur artist, noticed that he loved to pick up things with his teeth. On a whim, she tacked a piece of paper on a corral post, stroked a paint-laden artist's paintbrush across it and held the brush out to Cholla. The rest was Art History 101.

Cholla graduated to an industrial-strength easel which stands in his corral. Nobody rotates the paper or manipulates the easel. Cholla chomps down on the brush and paints what he likes. But is it Art?

His customers certainly think so. So does Kurt Kohl, an art curator based in McLean, Virginia. "(Cholla) is creating art on the level of a young child," says Kohl. "There may not be a lot of thought behind the process, but one could ask the same question about Pollock or De Kooning or Rothko."

Indeed. Or of Jan Fabre, Subodh Gupta and Jeff Koons. Gupta gave us the mammoth skull made out of ice buckets which sits outside the Palazzo Grassi in Venice. We can be grateful to Jan Fabre for the giant bug impaled on a seven-foot high steel needle in Leuven, Belgium.

And who can forget Jeff Koons' seminal work, Three Ball 50/50 Tank, which, last I heard was still enthralling audiences at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan? It consists of three basketballs floating in distilled water in a half-filled glass tank.

Philistine? Moi? Well, maybe just a little. Seems to me that if Art was a game of tennis, the lads could be accused of playing with the net down. But what do I know? Art's flickering standards have long been a source of deep confusion to me.

Take the case of Newport Nude, a painting by Sir Gerald Kelly which was bought by a public gallery in England in 1947 but then removed from public view and locked in a vault on the grounds that the woman portrayed in the painting was...well, nude. Very nude, if you catch my drift. Indecent and what not. This past summer, what with our new relaxed standards and all, Newport Nude was re-instated in the public gallery.

Alas, the authorities have seen fit to ban the painting once more. Not because the model is full-frontal nude. No problem with that. But she has...a lit cigarette in her hand.

If Cholla could read this, you know what kind of a laugh he'd be having.