Sometimes when you’re on your way to your destination, a thrift store will call out your name. This is what happened to Beth Feeback. She was on her way to sell her own cat paintings at an art show, when she saw a Goodwill, and decided to stop in to buy herself something warm, as it was a cold day. After she found a nice, warm blanket, she saw two huge paintings. Not loving the art on them, she was going to scrape off the paint and reuse the canvases for her own work. Each painting was going for $9.99, which was a steal.

When she got to the art show, she showed a friend, who noticed that the label on the back credited the canvasses to the Weatherspoon Art Gallery in North Carolina. As it was a gallery on a university campus, it occasionally had some big-name artists cycle their work through there. She suggested Feeback get them checked out.

When Feeback, got home, she tossed the paintings with her other canvasses and left them for a few months. When she was ready to do some more art, she grabbed those canvases to start preparing them for being scraped and repainted. Luckily she remembered her friend’s advice and did some research. As it turns out, one of them was “Vertical Diamond” by a famous abstract artist by the name of Ilya Bolotowsky.

The painting fetched almost $35K at auction. Good thing she didn’t ruin it with her own art – the world can only handle so many paintings of cats.