the ugly painting

This is not me...but it describes me pretty well

I am a dumpster diver as mentioned in my previous post. But I am not a hoarder...let's make that clear. My grandmother taught me that if you haven't used something for six months (with the exception of seasonal items), if it's broken, or if you have multiples, then you need to get rid of them. That maybe a hard thing for some people to do by I have no problem with it. The first time I ever did that, I was around 15 years old. My dad told me that I have too much stuff and that I need to get rid of some of it. So I didn't even think twice about it. I marched up two flights of stairs ( I slept in the attic) with a couple large boxes, pulled out my non-clothing dresser drawers that we full of who knows what that i collected over my 15 years and without searching through any of the 9 drawers, i pulled them out and turned them upside down into the box. I then went through my closet which expanded across an entire wall and threw out  and clothing items that I hadn't worn in the last year, and anything that didn't fit properly.

It felt amazing to do that and I recommend it to anyone. I don't know what I all threw out because I don't even know what was in those drawers and to this day I have no idea what I got rid of.
So back to dumpster diving. My roommate and I lived in a 17th floor apartment, and every week we have to take our recyclables down to the parking garage where the big bins are kept.  There was also a large dumpster there for larger garbage items that did not fit down the garbage chute...( for some reason our garbage chute room smelled amazing) so while we were down in the garage emptying our recycling bins and sorting our plastics and papers, we would wait for all the cars to finish driving by and then we would sneak a peek in the bins...just in case someone threw out a valuable. As I peeked in this one particular time I noticed the corner of a frame. I figured what the heck it might be in good enough shape to put one of my own pieces into. As I pulled out the frame, a painting came with it. Not a very beautiful painting. and the frame was quite tacky as well. My roommate and I just stared in awe at it perplexed by it's ugliness.
As we took a closer look at the painting, we realized that it wasn't a paining at all but rather a textured print. The image is that of multiple horses running across a grassy/sandy beach while also blending into their surroundings. I'm sure someone out there will find the painting exquisite, but to me it is slightly tacky in an outdated kind of way.
The frame was a light beige with faux gold peaking though. when I moved into my new house, I wanted to keep the painting but in order to not completely tackify my home I refurbished the frame. All it took was a simple coat or 2 or 3 of black paint. the painting no longer blends into the frame, but the tackiness is still in the image itself.
I could never get rid of this painting, even though I find it so ugly. I realize that the norm would be to hang paintings that are appealing to the eye. However, with this particular painting comes memories.
We hung the painting up in the apartment as soon as we brought it up only to be oooh and awwed by my then fiancée and his roommate. They claimed to have an ugly painting as well that was equally if not more ugly than ours. but it wasn't . There is a unique ugliness to this particular image
I remember standing on the balcony of our apartment and waaaay below me I saw my fiancée walking down the street with our painting in his arms! He actually stole it right off our wall and we never noticed!. I immediately ran down ( well actually I took the elevator) ran down the street and took it back. It now hangs nicely above our couch in our living room.

Maybe someday somebody will recognize the artist and tell me that this textured print is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars....that would be great...