1920's Blues Artwork Calendar

It's time to start thinking about ordering your 2008 calendar with Blues ads from the 1920's. I get mine every year from John Tefteller's

BLUES IMAGES .

Only $19.95 with a free cd of 15 blues songs by different artists. Here are a couple of examples of ads from the 2005 and 2006 calendars. The Mississippi Sheiks were amazing. The Hokum Scorchers played songs by Bo Carter and the Sheiks. Have a listen to a sampler of these guys on Amazon .

The Art of Amy Crehore

P.S. This calendar is also available here for a bit of a discount

NEW #1 Blues Gal Giclee Print by Amy Crehore

"Roaming Tomcat Rag" copyright by Amy Crehore 2006

The girl with the red guitar is now a print!

"Roaming Tomcat Rag" Blues Gal Series Painting by Amy Crehore is now available as a museum quality fine art, limited edition, artist signed giclee print for collectors.
It's an 8 1/2" square image on 10"x10" on Hahnemuhle acid-free photorag 308 gsm paper produced on the finest printer using superior ultrachrome inks.
Only 50 prints in this edition.
$90.00
with FREE SHIPPING
Free "Little Pierrot" and "Monkey Love" postcards and a certificate of authenticity come with each print. As seen on boingboing.net
Follow link to the "buy now" button on my homepage:
www.amycrehore.com

Introducing the first "Tickler" Ukulele

Front of Tickler Ukulele copyright 2007 by Amy Crehore (Built by Lou Reimuller) showing Tickler label

Back of Tickler Ukulele copyright 2007 by Amy Crehore (Built by Lou Reimuller)

Amy Crehore trademark "Tickler Ukulele"

CLICK on IMAGES to ENLARGE

Here is my very first fine art ukulele ("Tickler" brand label). This is a soprano uke that was lovingly hand-built by luthier Lou Reimuller, creator of Teenar Girl Guitar. It has a solid mahogany body and neck with a rosewood fingerboard and bridge. It plays and sounds great!

This "Tickler" brand uke is a one-of-a-kind fine art object which is entirely painted in oils on all sides by myself, Amy Crehore, with my trademark motifs: "The Banana Eater" image is on the back (from my "Monkey Love" series), a monkey and "little pierrot" combination are painted on the front. (The pictures show a little bit of glare.) Contact Amy Crehore for purchase information. (As seen on boingboing.net) See my fine art paintings on my website:

The Art of Amy Crehore

UPDATE: This uke has been sold. (11/07)

Kids Are Collecting High-End Art

All I can say is, "Wow, I had no idea".

Kelly Crow writes about a new wave of children collecting art in an article called "Small Collectors". "Encouraged by wealthy, art-loving parents, children are collecting Warhols and even Rembrandts." - KELLY CROW September 14, 2007

Wall Street Journal

The Art of Amy Crehore

Electric Quilts

Inger Brommeland, Hawaiian Applique Quilt, Norway
Heather Miller, Tropical Garden Quilt, Washington State
Inger Brommeland, Hawaiian Applique-block, NorwayMaureen Callahan, Synchronized SwimmingOriginal Design, Wilson, NY

I always loved Amish quilts for their sophisticated use of bright, contrasting colors and geometric designs even though the apparel of the Amish people themselves is modest and simple, with little color.

The Electric Quilt website had a contest to "Design a block in the Hawaiian appliqué style" and they have a gallery with 124 examples. These Hawaiian applique designs have so much in common with Amish designs.

Have a look at this wonderfully inspiring form of traditional, yet modern, "Op Art":

Electric Quilt

The Art of Amy Crehore

Gallery of Vintage Magazine Cover Art

Dutch Treat Club Yearbook Cover 1937
Photoplay Cover 1920
Truth Cover 1900
Amazing Stories Cover 1926

One thing leads to another. After I blogged those beautiful book endpapers from the Dutch Treat Club yearbooks of the 1940's, I went searching for more information. I found out that the Dutch Treat Club is a club that was founded in 1905 for people in the creative fields of art, literature and theater in NYC. They still have luncheons every Tuesday with guest speakers and entertainers at the National Arts Club. -link
Ellis Parker Butler, American author and humorist, was a member of the Dutch Treat Club and he was published in it's yearbook from 1921-1947. On a website dedicated to his work, there is a section with internal links to a wide assortment of vintage magazine covers. His stories were featured in all of these magazines. This is an amazing archive of images:
VINTAGE MAGAZINE COVER ART

The Art of Amy Crehore

Gallery of End Papers

Dutch Treat Club 1940
Dutch Treat Club 1945
Dutch Treat Club 1946

Nancy Stahl had a brilliant idea when she asked other illustrators over at the Drawger blog to post their favorite end papers. She ended up with a beautiful collection of mostly vintage illustrations. These examples show unique and inspiring combos of design, illustration and photography. I especially like the Dutch Treat Club end papers posted by Stephen Kroninger (shown above). Here's the link:

END PAPERS

The Art of Amy Crehore

Polka-dot Woman

Here she is in the sixties, making herself into art. She started painting dots at age ten according to her bio and she has had a long, successful career of it. Yayoi Kusama is a woman who has had a lifetime obsession with DOTS and it has served her well. She has had a lot of museum shows and "happenings" over the years.

Here are some of her products you can buy, she has left no stone un-dotted:

Yayoi Kusama

The Art of Amy Crehore

Just Have Faith

Detail of sketch for new painting by Amy Crehore

I am busy working on a large oil painting that has all of my characters in it. It's coming along just the the way it's supposed to. After working on small canvases for a few years, I was ready to work large again. Back to my old ways! There's my pierrot, my cat, my monkey, my gal, and even my demon in this one. I've got a beautiful bird bath and some green, green grass. She appears to be a blues gal because she's playing a guitar, but she is looking more like the girl in my "Little Pierrot" paintings -which means that she looks more like me.

This painting will be unveiled in November at a gallery in Santa Monica, CA.I will be blogging more about that show and it's curator soon.

Remember, when things don't go a certain way, just have faith in yourself and be flexible. Everything that happens is for a reason. It's exactly the way it's supposed to be.

The Art of Amy Crehore

The Fifties

Esquire cover 1951 or 1952

This is up on ebay for bidding.

It reminds me of something, but I can't say what.

There's the little Esquire guy with the bug eyes ... whom Liz doesn't seem to notice.

The Art of Amy Crehore

Art Lovers Rejoice!

If you don't have a model handy, here's a handy website full of art e-books for the art lover. Vintage photos are quite beautiful and entertaining. Sumthin' for everyone. I actually don't use these things for my art, but I enjoy looking at them. I prefer to draw from memory and imagination.

Fishes Eye Publishing

The Art of Amy Crehore

Vintage Halloween Costumes

Earliest Mickey Mouse 1931

1964 Rarest Rat Fink Costume

Well, it's not that far off and I know you are thinking about what to wear, so why not head over to the

Halloween Museum

and check out their vintage Halloween Costumes. These are classics!

The Art of Amy Crehore

Musical Beans

The Hokum Scorchers sang a traditional song about different kinds beans and what they could do to you. But, I never heard of this guy before:

"In the early part of the 20th century, Vaudeville stages in both France and America thrilled to the pooting of the wondrous, the amazing, LE PETOMANE! Joseph Pujol, a man of singular talent, was born in Marseilles, France in 1857.....would fart toons, suck water up into his rectum and spray like a firehose, and even performed that old standard of stage performers everywhere: impersonations.... According to Wikipedia, his fame lives on in the fringes of society: plays have been written on him, documentaries filmed, and–ostensibly–Johnny Depp himself has mentioned that he would like to portray M’sieur Pujol on film." - read more story by Derek C.F. Pegritz at

ectoplasmosis

Le Petomane courtesy of Damn Interesting .

The Art of Amy Crehore

Tickler T-shirt by Amy Crehore

T-shirt Art COPYRIGHT 2007 by Amy Crehore

I am working on having some Tickler t-shirts printed up. I may play around with the logo size and position, but this is basically the design and colors. It's an ink drawing of "Bubble Gum Music", one of my "Little Pierrots". I will let you know when they are available.

The Art of Amy Crehore

Rice Plate

"The Nibbler" copyright Amy Crehore 2006

"The Charmer, The Tickler, The Flower Muncher, The Nibbler, The Two-Timer, and The Examiner. Each are available (as limited edition signed giclee prints) for $200 directly from Amy Crehore."
Thanks, RICE PLATE , for blogging my Monkey Love prints (and my Little Pierrot prints).
Rice Plate is a cool blog with lots of great links and crazy features.

My Cat is Human

CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE

Isn't this a great photo of my precious cat?

The Art of Amy Crehore

Worth 1000 eye teasers

From the Monster contest
From the Them There Eyes contest
From the Celebrity Puppet contest
I'm sure most of you know about Worth 1000, but I did not. That is, until someone showed me an assortment of vegetables miraculously turned into beautiful animals. Above are just some of the surrealistic creations from that wacky site's photoshop contests. Crazy man. And creative, too.
WORTH 1000

The Art of Amy Crehore

Early Little Pierrots

Painting #3 by Amy Crehore
Painting #5 by Amy Crehore
Painting #6 by Amy Crehore
Painting #7 by Amy Crehore
Painting#8 by Amy Crehore

I don't even have some of my earliest "Little Pierrots" on my website. Here are a few from March 2004 and they only have numbers as titles. They are more sketchy than my later ones. Some I can't even show you (there are some that take place in a forest). I painted one per day (fast for me) and I sent them to an illustrator friend. It was an experiment and an exercise. They were drawn from my head using no references. It began with a painting of a cat sitting on a guitar boat in the ocean looking through binoculars at a naked girl on the beach. That is how I came up with the circular format... this was supposed to be what the cat saw. He saw a girl and a pierrot. Somehow they all ended up performing on stage. Later on, I spent up to a week on each one and they got more complicated and refined:

Little Pierrot Series

Mother Lode of Victorian Trade Card Art

I just came across an incredible resource for artists or anyone who loves Victorian illustration, humorous advertising and the color lithography of the late 1800's. I have shown only a few examples of Victorian Trade Cards here. Follow this link to an online reference library of an amazing amount of unique and exciting images:

THE TRADE CARD PLACE

Click on all of the links, you can't go wrong! A feast for your eyes.

Here's a brief intro to Victorian Trade Cards: "Over a century ago, during the Victorian era, one of the favorite pastimes was collecting small, illustrated advertising cards that we now call trade cards...Some of the products most heavily advertised by trade cards were in the categories of: medicine, food, tobacco, clothing, household, sewing, stoves, and farm. The popularity of trade cards peaked around 1890, and then almost completely faded by the early 1900s when other forms of advertising in color, such as magazines, became more cost effective." from article by Ben Crane

The Art of Amy Crehore

Look and Learn!

Click on images to enlarge
It is stamped "Property of Blackwell Jr. High", but it looks like a textbook for a 2nd grader. It's my "Look and Learn" book by Scott, Foresman and Company from 1949 that I picked up at a flea market so long ago that I can't remember where or when. It's my single most used reference book next to my Golden Nature Guides. And it's surreal. No real words, just some very strange and exciting pictures. I love the style of it, yet it was painted by nine different people. It's torn and beat up and dirty. I wouldn't have it any other way and I can't do without it sometimes.
The Art of Amy Crehore