In accompaniment to the Walt Disney Family Museum exhibition Magic Color Flair, John Canemaker provides this overview of the designer and illustrator Mary Blair.
Celebrated for her concept work on Disney features during the 1950s including Alice and Wonderland, Cinderella and Peter Pan, her drawings and paintings display bold, colourful and abstract shapes that area distinctly influential for today’s animation artists.
Not just confined to working within animation, she is equally well-regarded for the popular Golden Books Series; a venture in which her work truly shines with a much more refined and controlled style, certainly benefiting (as suggested in this book) from a more relaxed and less deadline focused environment.
Add to this already impressive body of work textile designs, amusement park rides and murals, and it portrays a prolific career rightly deserving of celebration. In whatever medium, hers was a delightfully optimistic style, with all the 1950s/60s modernist touches so popular with animators then and now, and comes beautifully presented in this book with informative text by John Canemaker covering her influences, education and technique.
For those with an eye and an interest for this classic style of popular art, Mary Blair should be considered an essential artist and this book provides the perfect introduction.