Pavel Hajko never tires of painting roosters. Inside his home studio in Kovacica -- a sleepy town in northern Serbia famous for its style of naive art -- the brightly coloured creatures cover the walls.

"From the beginning, even in elementary school, I painted only roosters," the 73-year-old artist told AFP, as he worked on an unfinished canvas in the afternoon light.

Outside, a cockerel obligingly crowed.

Hajko and his fellow artists have become world-famous for their childlike renderings of the traditional village life of the Slovak minority in the flatlands of the Banat region, north of the Danube.

"In naive painting, everything is done as you learn. It's not a school where the colour has to be this or that... we can put any colour," Hajko said.

The naive painting movement of self-

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