Purple House

Description

Purple House

30″x40″

Acrylic on canvas.

The Inspiration

Spring in Cumberland in the Comox Valley is a riot of yellow dandelions! They’re a delight for the artist, but a miserable scourge to the gardeners. Rain and sunshine pop out spring weeds in profusion!

Purple and yellow, complimentary colors, attract and repel each other at the same time. Similarly, Dorothy, Cumberland’s famous “Purple Lady” and her husband back in the 1950’s, shared both an attraction and repulsion! When her husband was away from Cumberland working in the bush, Dorothy painted the whole house a violent purple.

The village was in shock. No one had ever painted their house such wild colors in a conservative mining town! When her husband returned there was a huge ruckus and he left town. She told everyone that would listen that as she couldn’t get a divorce in the 1950’s, she had to resort to painting the house purple to get him to leave town.

Mrs. Mauve, as Dorothy was also known, was a town character, but she commanded respect as someone who had found a novel solution to her domestic problem.