She haggled the price of the canvas down from $8 to $5.
It was meant to be a gag gift to cheer up a friend who was down on her luck. At 68-by-48 inches, the large painting wouldn’t even fit through the front door of her friend’s trailer, but it was good for a few laughs.
“It was the first time I seen her laugh in a month,” Horton said. “We were going to throw darts at it, but we started drinking beer and never got around to it.”
Horton later tried to sell the painting at a garage sale, where an art professor told her it could be a work of art by the famous abstract expressionist painter Jackson Pollock.
“Excuse my language, but who the [expletive] is Jackson Pollock,” Horton said.
One of the most influential artists of the 20th century, Pollock was known for his large, chaotic canvases splattered with kinetic splotches of paint.
The last Pollock that went up for sale fetched a record-breaking $140 million for Hollywood mogul David Geffen, who sold the painting “No. 5, 1948,” in 2006.
Dubbed “Teri’s Find,” Horton’s thrift store painting went on sale for $50 million last week at an art gallery in Toronto after American art dealers refused to believe the authenticity of the work.
“The way they authenticate a painting is they look at it,” Horton said. “And they say ‘Oh, it doesn’t seem like a Pollock, it doesn’t have a heart like a Pollock, it doesn’t breathe like a Pollock.’”
Snubbed by art experts, Horton turned to science to validate the painting’s authenticity. She hired Montreal-based art restorer Peter Paul Biro, who used digital imaging to match a fingerprint from the painting to a paint can from Pollock’s studio.
