A $50-million find

Sitting in her Costa Mesa trailer, 76-year-old Teri Horton thinks she would like to buy a car when her $50-million ship finally comes in — an Escalade perhaps, but not a new one.

“I don’t think I’ll drive one off of the showroom floor — why would you,” said Horton, a retired truck driver.

“You lose about $30,000 in value right off the bat,” she said.

Horton hopes to turn a $5 painting she found at a junk store into a $50-million fortune.

Rummaging through a thrift shop in San Bernardino more than 15 years ago, Horton found a large, strange looking painting dripping with splotches of red, black yellow and red paint.

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.

Some experts still dispute whether “Teri’s Find” is a real Pollock. The online art registry Fine Art Registry commissioned an independent investigation of Horton’s painting last year that questions Biro’s fingerprint analysis. A handful of artists have claimed that the work is theirs, and the International Foundation for Art Research also has said the painting is not a Pollock.

The painting and controversy surrounding it has made Horton a quasi-celebrity in the art world. CNN and “60 Minutes” both have interviewed Horton about her $5 thrift-store find. Former “60 Minutes” producer Harry Moses released a feature-length documentary in 2006 chronicling Horton’s struggle to have the panting authenticated. The film is titled “Who the #$%& is Jackson Pollock?”

Whereas American art dealers have refused to believe the painting is real, the Canadian art scene has welcomed “Teri’s Find.”

“The response has been out of this world,” said Michelle Delisle, owner of Gallery Delisle in Toronto a small, upstart gallery where Horton’s painting has been on display for the past week.

“The painting is represented and received in a whole different light in Canada. They don’t question the authenticity of the painting, they question why Teri Horton was treated so unjustly and unfairly,” Delisle said.

People have flocked to see the painting in Toronto, said Horton, who flew to Canada to visit the gallery in October.

“The people of Canada had fallen in love with [Horton],” Delisle said. “We are also just so delighted to have such a fantastic Pollock in our country.”

Horton believes the painting would have easily been accepted by the art world if she were a little more well-heeled or had an art degree hanging on her wall.

“When somebody buys the painting, it will immediately validate it, but it won’t be validated by me because I pissed them off,” Horton said.

Besides a second-hand Escalade, there is little else Horton wants to buy if the painting sells.

She’d like to help out her four sons and maybe take a trip to Ireland, where her ancestors are from. She can see all the way to Catalina from her trailer and that’s good enough for her.

The rest she will probably give away to help people, she said.

“I guess the good Lord was looking out for it — he gave it to me for a reason,” Horton said of the painting. “The money is to be used wisely.”

BRIANNA BAILEY may be reached at (714) 966-4625 or at [email protected].