New AVAM exhibit features reclusive artist's color-rich paintings

He started painting after walking out on his only art class. Soon, vibrant colors filled canvasses and every surface of his house — the stove, kitchen cabinets, even the radiator.

Artist Eddy Mumma, who lost both his legs to diabetes, shut himself in his tiny home in Gainesville, Fla., and painted voraciously, sometimes using both sides of canvasses. It wasn't until after his death in 1986 that a friend acquired a trove of the art, some of it insect encrusted, and took painstaking steps to conserve them.

Starting Saturday, 109 of his paintings and portraits will be on display at the American Visionary Art Museum. It's the largest and most comprehensive show of Mumma's work, and will run for a year.

Rebecca Hoffberger, AVAM's founder and the show's curator, says it's easy for her to imagine Mumma immersed in bright, happy colors and thick paint, "momentarily knowing nothing of lost limbs, hellish Florida heat, or loneliness.

"We are reminded what restorative, soul-saving powers art has the grace to grant us all," Hoffberger said in a news release.