Friday 20 June 2014

SOMETHING ABOUT MARY

She was a woman working the male-dominated world of film animation and what she brought to it was a artistic sensibility that helped shape some of the best-loved Disney animated films of the 1950s and one of Disneyland's most popular and enduring attractions, it's a small world...

Mary Blair (1911-1978) had a talent for graphic art with, as her fellow concept artist, Joe Grant, noted, "almost a calligraphic quality to her line" combined with an eye for shape and form and how they might be expressed in animation and, above all, an astonishing talent for choosing colour palettes that arrest the eye and fire the imagination.

Mary Blair's work is currently being celebrated at the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco in an exhibition entitled Magic, Color, Flair: The World of Mary Blair, a title shared by the accompanying book/catalogue written by Disney authority, John Canemaker. You can read more about Mary Blair, her art, the book and the exhibition on my decidedly disney blog.

Meanwhile, here are few favourite examples of Mary's sensational art * from arguably her three greatest film projects: Cinderella...





 

  ...Alice in Wonderland...




 


...and Peter Pan...







* Not all of the art are featured in this blog post appear in the exhibition or the accompanying book.




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