We're just dotty about you

Calling all lovelorn males. Help is at hand in the form of seven paintings by Aboriginal artist Jimmy Pike, on show at the Rebecca Hossack Gallery.

Although they may at first sight look like abstracts composed of thousands of tiny white dots, they are in fact half of a spell for winning over the fairer sex.

All you need to do is copy these shapes on to your torso and persuade Pike to teach you one of his love songs, which you must solemnly repeat at intervals.

He is in town for just two weeks and you are also up against a large and wealthy contingent of collectors who buy his work for its raw power rather than its love interest. The list includes former Conservative panjandrum Lord McAlpine, the horse trainer Lord Huntingdon and the national and state galleries of Australia.

Ever since Australian billionaire Robert Holmes ? Court supplied a group of native Australian artists with canvases and paint back in the 1970s, the market in contemporary Aboriginal art has blossomed.

The record price recently doubled to a scorching $486,000 at Sotheby's. Jimmy Pike - or Kurnti, as his fellow Aborigines call him - backed by his remarkable British wife, Pat Lowe, is a leading light in this movement.

They make an odd but endearing couple: he plump, gnomic and benign under his baseball cap; she an articulate, if somewhat weather-beaten, English rose.

Born some 60 years ago in the Great Sandy Desert region of Western Australia, Pike only started painting in 1980, while serving a prison sentence for murder. Then he met Pat, a visiting community welfare officer, and fell in love with her. When Jimmy started courting her with pictures and love songs, she willingly succumbed.

On Jimmy's release from prison in 1986, they set up camp together in the bush. Here, 100 miles from any other human contact, Jimmy developed his talent for boldly coloured compositions, recording the land of his childhood and its mythological origins with symbolic dots and lines. Meanwhile, Pat learned Aboriginal survival techniques and became a persuasive advocate for Aboriginal rights.

They have collaborated on a number of books, with her writing the text and him providing illustrations. Best known is Jimmy and Pat Meet the Queen, a fantasy account of her visit to his home territory in Western Australia; designated vacant Crown Land, it is thus owned by the Queen. In the book, Jimmy invites Her Majesty to hunt with him, to test the validity of her claim. After struggling in her tiara and jodhpurs, she admits to being defeated by this alien terrain.