Oaxacan Wood Carvings

Clapping Monkey
Hands Up Monkey
Silver Fruited Monkey

La Fuente is a wonderful website loaded with animal carvings from Oaxaca, Mexico and much, much more. Here are some monkeys carved and painted by folk artists, Jacobo Cortes and Arsenio Morales. These are very inspiring to me...the patterns are amazing.

LA FUENTE

The Art of Amy Crehore

Mexican Lobby Cards

For a lot more images of crazy, side-splitting Mexican Lobby Cards try this great website:

ASIFA

The Art of Amy Crehore

Vintage Photo Archive

Organ Grinder 1930s San Francisco

Afro American contortionist guitarist Pennsylvania 1921

These images are from the Vintage Photo Archive .

They have lots of great old images that you can order prints of

(Thomas Robinson, Portland, OR).

The Art of Amy Crehore

Cat by Kubin

Drawing By Alfred Kubin

(b.1877-d.1959)
The Art of Amy Crehore

In the Swim

Charles Robinson, Illustrator
Kogyo Terazaki

Kokunimasa Utagaw

I love these! I have been looking for images of bathers in old-fashioned bathing costumes. Be sure to click on images to enlarge.

I got these from Japonisme via Internet Weekly. Thanks!

The Art of Amy Crehore

Butterfly Hunter

Nabokov

Every summer Vladimir Nabokov and his wife would go butterfly hunting. He deposited the specimens he found at scientific institutions such as Harvard or Cornell Universities. It was during these expeditions that "Lolita" was finally finished in 1954, 14 years after Nabokov had first thought of the idea. He wrote the novel in the evenings or on cloudy days while travelling through America: western places such as Telluride, CO; Afton, Wyoming; Portal, Arizona; and Ashland, OR. He was not a party person. He liked to hang out with his wife, play chess and hunt butterflies. The rest of the time was spent mostly writing in solitude, for that is what all great writers do.

The Art of Amy Crehore

Lo and Behold: Amy Crehore's "Literartistry" Paintings

Click to enlarge details- Amy Crehore "Story of Lolita" paintings

"The Story of Lolita, Part One" copyright 2007 Amy Crehore

"The Story of Lolita, Part Two" copyright 2007 Amy Crehore

Click on Images to Enlarge

In the book "Lolita" by Vladimir Nabokov, Humbert Humbert is a demon-man full of lust for little Lo, his twelve year old American step-daughter. Humbert was psychologically stunted at age 13 because his first love, Annable Leigh, had died of typhus at only 12. "Lolita" is a prison "memoir" written by an intellectual adult man (Humbert) who is also a murderer and child molestor. ' In recounting his relations with Lolita, Humbert gradually moves from feeling only blind lust for the twelve-year-old "nymphet" girl, to genuine and everlasting love for a worn-out, old-before-her-time adult woman. The reader abhors Humbert's lust, and using of Lolita, but can empathize with his constant guilt over his physiological addiction.' (link) The novel is brilliantly well-written with continuous streams of complex and clever literary allusions. The poetic novel, "Lolita", has inspired my two new paintings (above) for the upcoming group show, "Literartistry".

The "Literartistry" show opens at Corey Helford Gallery in Culver City, CA on August 11, 2007 from 7-10 pm and continues for 3 weeks. About 50 artists will participate, each interpreting his/her favorite book, and the books themselves will be available for check-out in an upstairs library. Please contact gallery for purchases and check their website for online viewing.

To see my paintings without frames go to:

The Art of Amy Crehore