CALGARY -- Sunflowers had Vincent Van Gogh.  Campbell’s Soup cans had Andy Warhol.  And now, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups have Emily Bickell, a Calgary artist with the visual equivalent of a sweet tooth.

Bickell is the Calgary artist whose painting of a package of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups was selected from 6,000 submissions, in a variety of art forms, by the candy manufacturer to promote its brand on a billboard

The electronic, LED-style billboard sits on Glenmore Trail, near Fairmont, where every few seconds, Bickell’s painting is flashed electronically to passing vehicles.

"We saw a lot of unique and creative submissions from Reese fans all over Canada," said Reese assistant marketing manager Dulangi Kapugama, in an email to CTV News, "including a few poems and even a rap. Emily's artwork stood out to us as it was the only painting that was submitted, and is such an accurate representation of the classic Reese Peanut Butter Cup.

"You can tell she put time and effort into it (I mean, it looked good enough to eat!) in order to prove her love of Reese. We knew we had to reciprocate that love by spotlighting her masterpiece on a billboard."

It’s kind of an odd showcase for Brickell, a fine arts graduate of the University of Waterloo, who has exhibited her work in galleries in Calgary, Toronto, Niagara-on-the-Lake and Switzerland, among many others, but that’s what you get when combine a talented painter with someone who spent her high school years in southern Ontario eating Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.

“There  was a period in my life when I ate one every day,” Bickell said, in an interview with CTV News. “there was a vending machine by the door I left in high school, and every day, on the way home from high school (I would buy one).”

Now, Bickell lives in Calgary, working from a home studio, which has suddenly gotten crowded in the pandemic, with two young children, aged seven and nine, home from school and her husband working remotely.

She said she saw the call for submissions on the Reese Instagram feed, and sent in a painting.

Although she’s more of a nature painter, who favours water, birds and gardens, she had recently departed from her traditional themes to paint a series of portraits of donuts.

“My husband brought me home a donut on a walk - he went out with my daughter - and just something about the way the light was hitting it struck me as the need to paint so I did one, and once I did one, I had to do more,”she said. “But I’m not really a big donut fan, so I had to bring donuts home and once I painted them, my kids get to eat them.”

A few weeks ago Bickell received a message from Reese: she was informed, somewhat cryptically, that she had been admitted to something called The Reese Society, a group reserved for passionate peanut butter cup lovers.

“They got in touch and said they want to take it a little further,” she said.

That’s when she found out it was her painting that was about to become a billboard.

“It took a little while to get it together,” she said,  “and then I went and saw it last weekend. It looked really cool.”

That said, Bickell admitted it was a little bit jarring unveiling your art driving down a highway rather than gathering at a gallery.

“It’s kind of interesting to have artwork up on one (a billboard),” she said. “I know there’s a lot of creative design that goes into marketing, but I live in a different world. I’m a gallery artist, so it’s really unusual for my work to be there.”

The painting will be on display along Glenmore through Dec. 30.

And as for Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, which blend salty peanut butter with milk chocolate, Bickell said she didn’t find it too mysterious why they have cultivated a passionate following over the years.

“It’s kind of the ultimate combination,” she said.