BIO/CONTACT

Amy Crehore was born in the mountains of Virginia and grew up in the suburbs of Pennsylvania and New Jersey on the train line to NYC. She attended Virginia Commonwealth University's School of the Arts earning a B. F. A. in Communication Arts and Design. After graduating, she lived outside of London for a short while before returning to Richmond, VA to start her career.

Amy Crehore has been painting ever since her first juried shows at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in the late 1970s. She sold her work through the VA Museum Sales Gallery, participated in east coast group shows and solo shows, and worked as a graphic artist/illustrator at various publishers before moving out west to Oregon in 1987. She spent over three decades in Oregon, only recently returning to the east coast to live.

In 1991, the art directors at Playboy and Esquire magazines saw reproductions of her paintings and commissioned illustrations. For a couple of decades, Amy Crehore did editorial illustrations for top American magazines such as The Atlantic Monthly, Business Week, ESPN Magazine, Esquire, Forbes, GQ, Islands, The Los Angeles Times, MS., The New York Times, Outside, Playboy, Prevention, Redbook, Rolling Stone, and Texas Monthly. She painted book covers for Simon and Schuster and Houghton Mifflin and illustrated a picture book about Machu Picchu (which was featured on the Today Show). Her double portrait of Jewel and Alanis Morissette is included in the first anthology book "ROLLING STONE: The Illustrated Portraits" (Chronicle Books, 2000) and is part of Rolling Stone's art collection.  

During this time, she continued to exhibit her paintings in shows at the Museum of American Illustration (in NYC) and the Portland Art Museum (in Oregon), plus various west coast galleries from Seattle to Los Angeles. 

Amy Crehore has been honored with juried awards from WESTAF, Portland Art Museum (OR), Communication Arts magazine, The American Illustration Annual, The Society of Illustrators (NYC and Los Angeles), The Museum of American Illustration (NYC), The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and more.  

In 2005, Amy Crehore participated in Monte Beauchamp's first ever Blab! Art Show at Track 16 Gallery in Santa Monica, CA. Since then, she has exhibited with many galleries that showcase new contemporary figurative painting. The Shore Institute of Contemporary Art (NJ), Robert Berman (Santa Monica, CA), Thinkspace (L.A., CA), Roq la Rue (Seattle, WA), Last Rites (NYC), Marianne Boesky (NYC), Ad Hoc Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), M Modern (Palm Springs), Corey Helford (L.A.), Applegate (Santa Monica, CA), Copro Gallery (Santa Monica, CA) and Parlor Gallery (Asbury Park, NJ) have all shown Amy's work. 

In 2015, Amy began exhibiting bi-annually with Jiro Miura Gallery in Tokyo, Japan and in 2017, Antonio Colombo Gallery of Milan, Italy mounted a special show featuring 15 examples of Amy's artwork (current and historic pieces).

In November 2019, Amy Crehore had a solo show of new paintings called "Bathers, Buskers and Cats" at La Luz de Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles, CA. In December 2019, she was invited to be part of Juxtapoz Magazine's 25th Anniversary B & W Drawing Show in Miami, FLA.

In 2020 Amy exhibited in the 15th Annual Blab! show at Copro Gallery in Santa Monica, CA (her 6th Blab! show) and in a group show at Mortal Machine Gallery in New Orleans, LA. 

Amy's 4th group show in Japan - "Ephemeral -Territory of Girls"- took place at Jiro Miura Gallery, Tokyo, Japan, Sept. 18th- Oct. 24, 2021. She exhibited paintings at the San Francisco Art Market, April 2022 with La Luz de Jesus Gallery of L.A. and in Central Hong Kong at Seefood Room Gallery, in a show called "Serendipitous Splendour", Nov-Dec 2022. 

Amy's 5th Ephemeral Show took place at Jiro Miura Gallery in Tokyo, Japan Sept. 16th-Oct.22, 2023. From January 6 thru February 10, 2024, Amy participated in "Dreams and Reflections" a group show at Richard Heller Gallery in Santa Monica, CA. Her new painting "Still Life with Pears" is now part of the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection and installed at The Bunker Art Space, West Palm Beach, FL for the 2024-2025 season.

Amy Crehore's paintings are mysterious, intuitive, poetic and timeless; a fictional realism drawn from memories and feelings and rendered with humor. She is inspired by the compositions of modern European masters such as Felix Vallotton, Felice Casorati,  Picasso, Edouard Vuillard, Antonio Donghi, Giorgio De Chirico, Magritte, Matisse and Balthus as well as earlier painters such as Goya and Giotto. Comics, antique musical instruments, American roots music, vintage children's books, nature, cats, films and early photography have all influenced her work. 

Amy and her husband, Lou Reimuller, played 1920s-30s blues music in a band called The Hokum Scorchers for many years. Together, they have designed and built a few one-of-a-kind ukuleles (Lou is a luthier). In 2009, Amy painted designs on a selection of vintage ukuleles for her solo show at Thinkspace Gallery in Los Angeles. They were exhibited alongside her original canvases. 

Please Contact:

amy@amycrehore.com