Morris Louis went from peeling potatoes at an Italian restaurant to founding his own movement, one of art history’s great reminders to follow your dreams.

His work may be in the Met now, but life wasn’t always so fancy shmancy for Morris Louis. This scrappy recluse spent the bulk of his career as a struggling artist, working odd jobs to pay for painting supplies. His parents pushed him to become a doctor like his three oh-so-perfect brothers, but Louis instead bounced around as Baltimore’s resident potato-peeler, laundry folder, window decorator, and cemetery grass-mower. Once, he tried (and failed) to sell one of his paintings for twelve bucks.

Plot twist: a Louis went for £1.5 million in 2015. Although he certainly had a savvy eye for color, I put some of it down to good old-fashioned perseverance. He painted for 8-9 hours daily, whipping up over 600 paintings from his 14x12 foot dining-room. If you’ve ever seen a Louis in real life, you might be thinking the math doesn’t add up; his canvases are really freakin’ huge. You’d be right. Many of his drippy rainbow pieces didn’t fit in his makeshift studio, so Louis had to get creative with rolling up the dry sections.

Louis didn’t leave the house much, but in 1953, he took a trip to New York to meet an artist named Helen Frankenthaler. Frankenthaler was really into the flat aesthetic and experimented with staining canvases to eliminate the fraction-of-a-millimeter depth where paint usually sits on top of the surface. Louis was impressed and squirreled her idea back to his own dining-room. Her profound influence led him to create his Veil series, which soaked unstretched canvas in diluted acrylics. He eventually destroyed about 300 of these, but it’s all part of the learning process. Fall down 300 times, get up 301, as they say.

Louis’ perseverance finally started paying off toward the end of his career. Literally - a critic buddy got him into the upscale galleries of New York and his work began to sell. (His first big splurge was a Ford Thunderbird. Treat yo’ self!) Now, Morris Louis is remembered as a pioneer of Color-Field stain-painting, a founder of the Washington Color School, a leading figure in Abstract Expressionism, and an all-around major dude in the history of modern art. A far cry from potato-peeler, if you ask me.