The art of Mary "Small World" Blair

By Cory Doctorow at 6:23 pm Monday, Mar 4

This site chronicles the life, times and work of Mary Blair, the genius designer behind It's a Small World and much of Disney's trippier, stylized artwork, including Alice in Wonderland. The Disney Channel has a great mini-documentary on Mary Blair they run as an interstitial during Walt Disney Presents, and she's just amazing, animated and feverish as she describes her elegant design choices in words simple enough for Walt to appreciate.
Design is, or should be, an indespensable concomitant in every kind of picturemaking, even in magazine illustration which is primarily concerned with naturalism. But when an artist enters the world of fantasy, discarding practically every vestige of anatomical verity, as in Mary Blair's whimsical creations, design takes over one hundred percent. Well, not quite; the fanciful world, albeit in the realm of decorative art, must not be completely divorced from reality, it's inhabitants cannot be pure abstractions even when they are essentially devoid of natural attributes.

A Mary Blair horse, though quite unlike a horse, is yet a horse. The same tenuous reference to human beings is seen in her delightfully impossible girls with moon faces, pipelike necks, and legs which dangle helplessly without bone or muscle even when skipping in a field of daisies. Link Discuss (Thanks, Charles!)