Spotlight on Mary Blair

I've been mentioning Mary Blair so much lately that it has just occurred to me that to anyone reading this blog that doesn't know who she is, that comment means literally nothing.  So I decided to do a quick little post on her and hopefully introduce you all to her, if you haven't met already.

Mary Robinson Blair was born on October 21, 1911 in Okalahoma.  She later moved to Texas and then to California, where she studied art at San Jose State College and Chouinard Art Institute.  In 1934, she married fellow artist Lee Blair, who would go on to work with her at Disney.

She got her start in animation at Ub Iwerks's studio, and came to Disney around the time of Dumbo.  She was one of the eighteen artists to accompany Walt Disney to South America that would eventually lead to several shorts and the two feature length animated films Saludos Amigos and The Three Caballeros.  She provided concept art that heavily influenced a number of shorts, package film segments, and animated features including Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, and the animated portions of Song of the South and So Dear to My Heart.

She left the Disney studios after the completion of Peter Pan, and spent a number of years providing art for advertising and illustrating children's books.  In the mid-1960s, she returned to Disney to work on the it's a small world attraction that Disney provided to the 1964 World's Fair before it made its home in Disneyland.

She passed away in 1978 and was posthumously named a Disney Legend in 1991.

But the best way to really get to know Mary Blair, who is one of my personal favorite artists, is to see and appreciate her work.  This is some of her work for Disney... her influence on many of the Disney films is pretty obvious.