NO canvas will be left unchecked in one woman's bid to catalogue every existing oil painting in Dorset.

Art buff Gwen Yarker has begun the painstaking task of recording and photographing all publicly-owned oil paintings in the county for a national catalogue.

Mrs Yarker's mission has taken her from village halls to museums and council chambers to put art lovers in the picture about Dorset's oil painting collection.

She said: "I'm guesstimating there will be just under 3,000 to get through.

"The whole point of the project is that it's inclusive. There's no judgement about the works - you can have a painting by Mrs Jones alongside a painting by Joshua Reynolds in the catalogue."

Mrs Yarker, from Charminster, is one of a team of coordinators assigned by arts charity the Public Catalogue Foundation to make a permanent record of all the publicly-owned oil paintings in the UK.

She said: "It's like an audit of paintings.

"We want to understand what we have in Dorset and the sheer number of paintings that qualify is huge. All the money from the catalogues sold goes back into the arts and the whole point of it is to allow the public free access to the works they own."

The West Dorset area has a substantial collection of oil paintings, Mrs Yarker added, the most well known being works by artists Russell Coates and Francis Newbury, Mrs Yarker, a former curator for the Maritime Museum, plans to finish her oil painting quest by the middle of 2008.

The foundation's national catalogue is due to be published in May 2009.

See www.thepcf.org.uk for more information.