Ok, so not sure if anyone else has had this issue but am posting this along with a fix, just in case.
My sim had a bunch of friends over and one of them started a painting and then left. Normally I can just scrap them and move on but for some reason, this one was stuck on the easel. I suppose I could have just deleted the easel and all but instead I thought I would be clever and move the easel into my inventory. This was not a good idea as I ended up with the easel and the picture being separated. I could place the easel back into it's spot but the picture was locked into my inventory and even travelling and exiting the game, yep I saved it, did not make the picture any more removable.
In order to remove it, I had to join the household with the person who had started the painting, and then I could finally remove it. Once gone, I moved my sim out and back into his own home. So if anyone else has this problem, that's what you have to do. I saw a few other post where people had this issue but it didn't seem to get resolved and as the posts were old, I figured people had just given up and restarted.
