So today, we're going to jump into a project that I have been working on, on and off, for years now.The life of legendary Disney artist, Mary Blair.In the past, I've explained some of my process to create these longer series.
I have a set of files over on my computer where I collect up documents, notes, recordings for a number of different topics.
And when I feel that those files are relatively full and have enough material to create an interesting project, I start to outline it.
The first outline is a basic overview, typically to understand the scope of a person's life or the evolution of a project.
And then I expand out that topical outline to a far more detailed outline that has all of the individual quotes and descriptions that I plan to incorporate into the series.
For this series here, there are many thousands of raw pages that I went through, interviews, essays, letters, travel diaries, and other materials to find the quotes and descriptions that I wanted to use.
At some places in that longer outline, I also start to write out paragraphs that I think will likely show up in the series.
The longer outline for this new series, which again is mainly the quotes and footnotes to the original sources, is presently 151 pages or a little over 70,000 words.
Long time listeners know that I am absolutely terrible at guessing how long or how many parts a series will have based on that expanded outline.
I try to give each series the space it needs to fully explore key aspects of an artist's life or key elements of a project.
Most weeks I'll write out another part of this series, essentially converting over another section of that longer outline into prose until we finish up everything here.So at this point, I do have the beginning, middle, and end deeply flushed out.
In that longer outline, there are, at the moment, exactly 723 footnotes that identify sources for 723 quotes.
For today's episode, for example, when writing it out, I started with about 50 quotes from that outline and then added in another dozen from interviews, newspapers, and experts on California watercolors as I came to places that needed more breadth or detail.
I'm putting this note here up front so that everyone knows that, as with previous series, even though I will say that I'm writing out these episodes week by week, which is true, there's a lot of pre-planning here, a very long and detailed outline, and a flowchart beneath each week's offering.
But with that, I think over the next set of weeks, we'll have one of the most interesting and important stories about the history of the Disney Company, both in terms of films and the parks.
A story that played out largely during the lifetime of Walton Roy. And so, with that, I also need to thank another round of Bandcamp subscribers, because, quite simply, their support allows these projects to move forward.
And so, today, thanks are going out to Zach, R. Mullinary, The Tragic Attic, Murdoch, Carson, and, of course, to all who support us over on Bandcamp. And now, let's jump in to the story of legendary Disney artist, Mary Blair.
At Disneyland, there are few attractions that can be described as primarily the artistic vision of one person, few areas that are an expression as to how one artist understood their work and message.
One of those attractions, however, is It's a Small World, a key Disney offering. There's a version of this ride not only at Disneyland but also at Disney World, Tokyo Disneyland, Disneyland Paris, and Hong Kong Disneyland.
But the one in California is the original, an attraction overseen and approved directly by Walt Disney. This version of Small World premiered at the 1964 New York World's Fair, and then after the fair closed, it was relocated to California.
The attraction was largely based on the designs of one person, a person many believed was Walt's favorite artist, Mary Blair, a woman who trained in illustration, a woman who was part of the California scene watercolor movement,
An artist who was so valuable to the Disney studio that Walt, for years, led her work from home in New York, sending or delivering her watercolors to the studio every two or three months.
Her work is noted for its unique pairing of colors, its flat storybook presentation, and its reliance on basic shapes.But beneath these surface elements, Her work conveys precise and complex emotions.
The children in Small World radiate youthful bliss and innocence.
These images of childhood represent innate hope, a vision of bliss that Mary arranged for Disney even as her own marriage began to crumble under the weight of alcoholism and as one of her boys battled schizophrenia.
Her understanding of childhood is divorced from the troubles of adult life, an understanding she developed over many years, a mix of charm, openness, and community.
Her watercolors of slightly older characters, arranged for Disney features such as Cinderella and Peter Pan, show characters struggling to find their adult roles.Cinderella, under Mary Blair's brush,
was an isolated character, yearning for something beyond life with her stepmother.
For Peter Pan, Mary presented characters who, at the end of childhood, experimented with one adult identity and then another, from the exuberance of a slightly romanticized dance to open conflict with Hook and his men.
The work of few, if any, artists from the studio's golden age and from its mid-century offerings is more recognizable and imitated than that of Mary Blair.She was a concept artist, a lead painter who developed the style for Disney features.
Images in her exploratory watercolors were often refined and revised by those in character animation, backgrounds, and layout. With only a few exceptions, her own brush strokes never reached the screen.
Yet she created art that set the rest of the Disney studio into motion.She was the artist behind the other artists, her work defining how characters and backgrounds would be styled for an entire film.
Even though she believed that most of her watercolors for Disney would likely never be viewed by the public, they remained some of the most powerful pieces at the Disney Animation Research Library.
Her watercolors unified character expression, gesture, and setting into deeply saturated presentations of mood, desire, and emotion.In one painting for Cinderella, she presented the lead cinder girl in elegant isolation.
wearing a maid's costume, gazing into a gilded mirror, as though hoping to understand the person who now stared back.But the story of Mary Blair is not just the story of a single-minded artist.
It's also the story of how marriage influenced her as a person, a marriage in which her husband, also a watercolorist, often received less recognition than did Mary, especially in his later years.
Her story is one of a person struggling to fit into mid-20th century roles, yet with talent that allowed her to rise above her contemporaries.She was trained both in college and art school, but her vision
especially watercolors she made after the age of 30, came from someplace deep inside her, a sense of colorful wonder and visual contemplation that existed far beyond those painterly techniques she had learned in school.
Walt Disney seemed very fond of Mary.Her niece explained, Walt told us that he would see all these wild and beautiful colors of Mary's, then he'd go outside and see all those colors in the sunset.
John Hench, one of Walt's lead artists and also a person who at times was somewhat envious of Mary's rare gifts, confirmed, Walt really had an enormous respect for Mary's taste.Nothing ever went wrong with her color styles.She was impeccable.
No matter what she touched, it came out glowing. In terms of vision, lead animator Mark Davis put it succinctly, there was magic that her stuff had that nobody else had.
During the 1940s and 1950s, Mary Blair with her blonde hair and green eyes could have been easily mistaken for a movie star, a tall, wide-shouldered woman who might have been ideal for dramatic roles.
She routinely described herself as being five foot and five and a half inches tall, always including that half inch, as though, even in physical stature, she was striving to be as tall as those around her.
She shopped at Lord & Taylor, one of the upper-end department stores in New York.When she found interesting fabrics, she designed and made her own clothes.At times, touched with theatrical flair.She wore hats, scarves, and capes.
She wore eyeglasses, though she didn't care to be photographed in them. Her personality was a mix of soft confidence touched at times with shyness.
She was a woman whose talents elevated her above most, if not all, men at the Disney Studio during a time when married women tended not to work.One friend described her as extremely quiet in demeanor, speaking slowly, deliberately.
She also had a quick wit and a wonderful laugh. Others noted that she was a reflective person, a person without ego, who accomplished great things but rarely reveled or even discussed her work.
Many at the Disney Studio believed that she was Walt's favorite artist.For decades, letters of open admiration passed back and forth between them.She was a person who, in her later years, produced images of children that radiated joy.
A person who sought happiness and love, but was often met with struggle and disappointment. leaving much of her happiness relegated to images she created on paper.
This is the story of Mary Blair, a brilliant woman who created quiet moments of bliss in her art, moments of bliss that sometimes eluded her in life.She could do things that would make you see more than what you see, Alice Davis said.
In many ways, both in his professional and personal life, Walt took a greater interest in Mary's life and career than he did with nearly every other artist at his studio.
Even after she separated from Disney employment, he sent her letters, he sent her children gifts, he helped her find non-Disney freelance work, both in California and New York.
During the height of her career, her work could be seen in movies and magazines and advertisements, in department store windows, and in a series of children's books.
She was married to Lee Blair, one of the founders of the California Scene Movement, whose career slowly shifted from art and animation into management of his own studio.
A shift that brought him frustration, anger, and at times self-loathing, as he was no longer producing much, if any, art.
From a certain perspective, their marriage should have been one of the key romantic relationships during the golden age of animation. Two studio designers and colorists joined at the altar.
But in actuality, their marriage brought them both opportunities and limitations, especially as Mary, with her highly visible achievements, found that her family life was more peaceful if she didn't dwell on her artistic accomplishments at home or while being interviewed with her husband.
In ways, her great sense of art became a personal world, one that she explored with other artists and one that nurtured her, even while family problems rocked the ground beneath her feet.
I was born, Mary began, along with a twin sister in McAllister, Oklahoma.
The date was October 21, 1911, one year before Arizona and New Mexico became states, two years before the creation of a federal income tax, and three years before Charlie Chaplin, dressed in his iconic bowler's hat, first graced the silver screen.
McAllister, population 12,000, was a mix of railroad tracks and dirt roads, its largest places of employment, an ammunitions plant and a state prison.
The downtown was a row of stores arranged around a central street, along with a federal courthouse and a hospital. Mary's father, John Robinson, was an office accountant.
Her mother, Barda, ten years younger, stayed home to raise the family, which included Mary's twin sister, Augusta, who was more often known as Gussie, and her older sister, Margaret, known as Peggy.
At times the family lived with Mary's maternal grandmother on the west side of town. an arrangement that revealed the financial struggles that they faced as a family.Their house was a rectangular structure made from brick and wood.
Their yard, like that of nearby homes, was mostly dirt.After Mary and Gussie were born, their mother pushed them into town in an extra-wide wicker stroller, especially made for twins.
Mary always said her life in Oklahoma was tough, her friend Alice Davis explained, but she always spoke very highly of her father.She loved him dearly, said he made the best chili she ever had.
Her father tended to make it on Sundays after church in a large pot around which the whole family gathered. The family was religious, embracing a set of beliefs that Mary would quietly carry with her into adulthood.
She attended the Episcopalian church, with sermons that focused on the need to care for one another.At Sunday school, she was told that God was everywhere. Afterward, her family found her outside, waving at nearby plants.Hi, Gotti, she whispered.
It was this innocence, this benevolent connection with the world, that would stay with her for life. According to Mary, her father was a dreamer, and so he wanted to go to California, believing that things would be better there.
Mary's family left Oklahoma when she and her twin sister were about two years old.Their first stop was Texas before continuing west.I would assume they went to both states, Texas and California, because of work, one relative explained.
The Robinson family was poor.They did have struggles financially. Mary's father had experience as a bookkeeper.Her mother never had a full-time job, though she may have taken occasional work as a seamstress at home.
The family settled just south of San Francisco, spending a little time in Hollister and perhaps one other city before finally taking up residence in the small town of Morgan Hill, a town with under a thousand residents, filled largely with farmers.
The main crops were prunes, apples, walnuts, and almonds.John Robinson found work as a caretaker for a local hotel, the Friendly Inn, and the family lived in a suite on its third floor for years.
They remained a religious family, so much so that Mary's mother sewed altar clothes and vestments for the church. During these same years, Mary's mother, Varda, was diagnosed with a heart condition.
A doctor told her that she likely wouldn't see her children graduate from high school.She was prescribed nitroglycerin, but nobody in her family really believed that any heart condition would much slow her down.
Mary's sisters, Gussie and Peggy, had skills in writing, particularly in poetry.At times, Mary joined them in drafting out lines of verse, but Mary was the lone visual artist, working on her own drawings and experimenting with paints.
She graduated from Morgan Hill Elementary in June 1925.Two years later, she was confirmed at St.Stephen's Church, 10 miles south of her home in Gilroy, California.
In high school, she received some art training from Miss Bertha Bevier, a widow who primarily taught home economics courses, but also an occasional class in drawing.
Bertha Bevier was not a professional artist, but she encouraged Mary's interest and offered instruction where she could.
On June 14, 1929, Mary graduated from the Live Oak Union High School with the ceremony held at the friendly inn where her father worked.
Though her graduating class held only twenty-six students, Mary was at the top of them, the valedictorian, as though even then she was learning that her innate abilities often elevated her above those nearby.
Up until this point, with the exception of Mrs. Bevier's class, Mary had primarily taught herself how to paint and draw.Her sisters recognized that Mary was far more driven than either of them.
Mary was more aggressive than her sisters, one family member explained.I think she was a little more confident.She had a strong desire to do her painting from childhood. But Mary herself often downplayed her ambitions and talent.
I grew up obscurely defacing schoolbooks, she said, with crude drawings.
In this version of her life story, defacing schoolbooks with silly drawings could be seen as the first step toward becoming a major commercial artist in publishing, advertising, and feature animation.
Her silly schoolbook drawings, if they existed today, would easily be worth thousands of dollars to collectors interested in the history of Hollywood.But as a teenager, she saw them as something that could be easily thrown away.
During these same years, just east of Los Angeles, another key figure in this story was born.Lee Blair began his life in a family far more prosperous and more settled than that of the Robinsons.
Lee's father, William, was a contractor who built apartment buildings, houses, and theaters.He also built sets for early film studios, eventually including Warner Brothers and MGM.
Lee had one brother, Preston, who was three years older and would be his lifelong friend, perhaps the one person who best understood him, both in his gifts and his later struggles.
The Blairs lived at 1611 Gardena Avenue in Glendale in a house built just after the turn of the century by Lee's father and his uncle. The two boys, Lee and Preston, had a happy childhood.
They went to an elementary school close to home on Cerritos Avenue.In photos, the boys are often standing together, even holding hands.As their house was close to the railroad tracks, they developed an interest in trains.
My brother and I built a little platform out by the back fence, Lee explained, and we would hear the trains coming, so we would rush out on our platform and get up and look at them as they'd go by.
They mostly saw passenger trains with sleeping cars and dining cars, from the platforms they could see in through those passing windows.The waiters were all dressed in white, Lee added.The people were all there with their crystal.
Beyond trains, their father William was interested in automobiles, a hobby that was quickly becoming a fad in the 19-teens.The family had an early touring car, which they used to explore Southern California.
They drove to San Diego, Palm Springs, and other locations up and down the coast.The car was a Rio, Lee later explained, an early automobile with huge tires and an exterior gas tank on the running board.
At night, Lee added, my dad had to stop and light the headlamps with his match.The brothers were aware of Hollywood studios at an early age.
They lived walking distance, just three miles from the Mack Sennett studio where the Keystone Cop comedies were filmed.
After school, they could easily walk down to the studio, located just south of Griffith Park, and watch silent films being produced. Lee's interest in art, along with that of his brother, was first ignited by their mother.
She had a couple of Paul de L'Emperey paintings, Lee explained, a well-known French painter who had immigrated to California.First, Preston became interested in art while a student at Redlands High School.
His teacher there was Mrs. Mary Louise Arnold, Lee said, and she had a tremendous influence on him. Miss Arnold cultivated a club atmosphere in her class, giving students the sense that art might be part of their professional lives.
While Preston was in a fine arts class, Lee was taking a class in mechanical drawings, as his initial ambition was to study drafting to design boats.
But my brother was having so much fun with his art, his fine art, and I got to looking at it and realized that he was having a whole lot more fun, so I switched to art. Preston, Lee, and other children gathered each day to learn from Miss Arnold.
We were all students together there, Lee said.She had a wonderful free attitude toward painting.
The boys were aware that Miss Arnold, in years past, had taught other students, now rising in the world of art and film, including a watercolorist named Phil Dyke, then living in New York.
Miss Arnold was careful to point out how art could be more than a hobby or an enjoyable pastime.She indicated that art might take them places if they were studious, careful, and a little lucky. My father didn't like art at all, Lee said.
He wanted us to be more practical.Mechanical or architectural drawings, such as those used to design boats or homes, were one thing, as they led to careers.But a personal vision arranged into watercolors and oils was something else entirely.
Lee and Preston, by this point, were now hooked by dreams laid out around easels and tubes of paint.They could see no other future, other than the one that involved pencils, brushes, canvas, and expensive paper.
To pay for art supplies, Lee needed a part-time job.I used to have a paper route, he explained.Each day he took his bike downtown along with empty bags attached to his rack and stopped by the tracks.
I would sit in that corner and wait until a street car would come roaring by and a big bundle would come flying out in the air and go boom, and I would tear it apart and fold up all the newspapers and stick them in the back of my bike.
Then he pedaled around town delivering them before going home. In this way he was able to move himself, ever so slightly, toward the life of an artist as he had imagined it for himself.
Even though both Blair boys were now filled with less than serious career ambitions, their parents imparted to them a sense of family history, a set of examples by which they could measure their future success, something that might spur them on to lives beyond that of desperate painters.
Their father, William Blair, had come from a well-known East Coast family who primarily settled in Maryland and Virginia.
The brothers learned that their ancestors included one Supreme Court justice appointed by George Washington, one member of Abraham Lincoln's cabinet, and the inventor of the vacuum cleaner.
Also, probably, one of them signed the Declaration of Independence, Lee said, as there is a Blair signature.
In the early 1800s, their family had built the Blair House in Washington, D.C., located directly across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, which for decades had been used by presidents as a place of diplomacy.
They built that place, Lee explained, so they could lobby for the railroads.For Lee, at least, these family examples would become ghosts, strange apparitions whose success initially encouraged him.
Though it was never phrased in these terms, his parents, in laying out family history, indicated what it would take generally for their sons to feel successful in the context of the Blair family, to proudly stand shoulder-to-shoulder with their ancestors.
Beyond financial rewards,
Success, as it was defined in these stories, would need to play out in a large cultural, financial, or political stage, a marker that would prove even more difficult to achieve as America was just about to enter the Great Depression.
Preston, being older, was the first to graduate from high school.He studied briefly at Pomona College, then Otis Art Institute, both of which were far from home, before gaining admittance to the Chouinard Art Institute,
which was only eight miles from the family house.At the time, Chouinard was one of the leading art schools in Southern California, an institution established by Nelbert Chouinard to encourage local talent.
Like most art schools, it included courses in the fine arts, such as life drawing, portrait drawing, landscape and watercolors, But it also included courses in the commercial arts.
The school offered programs in illustration that, starting in 1930, were overseen by one of the leading magazine illustrators in America, Pruitt Carter, whose work appeared in McCall's Good Housekeeping, Lady's Home Journal, among many others.
His paintings illustrated essays, articles, and short stories in large circulation magazines.His paintings and watercolors typically highlighted the drama in the story or essay that they accompanied.
Chouinard also offered courses on artwork arranged for advertising.Beyond these, the school was beginning to offer classes in film-related disciplines, such as set design, set decoration, and costume design.
In this the school divided up its offerings between the pure arts, in which the primary rewards were artistic notoriety and at some point money, and the commercial arts, in which the primary rewards were a career and a reliable salary.
Preston entered as an illustration student, someone interested in developing his ability to draw and paint, but also someone interested in finding reliable work.
Among Preston's chief influences was Heinrich Klee, a German illustrator who specialized in humorous drawings that featured anthropomorphic animals, a turtle playing a guitar, or elephants skating across the ice.
These were the type of figures that Preston imagined someday drawing for magazine articles or perhaps for children's books.
In his last year, he worked closely with Pruitt Carter, then newly hired, who brought a stronger sense of commercialism to the school.
Based on his life choices, it seems clear that Preston was able to put aside the Blair family standards of success for art training that he believed would be more practical, even if his chosen field would render him somewhat unknown outside of commercial art circles.
I had studied with a famous illustrator, Preston explained, and intended to become a magazine illustrator.Lee, on the other hand, took the Blair family standards of success far more seriously.
After graduating from high school, he entered Chouinard under its fine arts program.Though young artists tended to struggle financially, they also had the ability to make a name for themselves through their paintings, drawings, and sculpture.
Through this, Lee believed he might someday become a person who might stand proudly beside a justice on the Supreme Court or a member of the president's cabinet. At Chouinard, he worked out a personal approach to art.
Being a scholarship student, I was pretty well free to take whatever classes I wanted, he said.He was not influenced by caricaturists or illustrators as was Preston, but rather painters who made their reputation in galleries and museums.
At the top of his list was contemporary French painter Jean-Louis Faurent. who depicted the lives of everyday working people with canvases presenting the racetrack, the courtroom, the ballet, and a series focused on outdoor cafes.
Under the influence of Ferrand's work, Lee saw value in presenting real people in commonplace situations.
using his brush to capture realistic situations as opposed to the romantic idealism of artists of the previous century or surreal expressionism that was then popular in Europe and New York.
He worked with oils trending toward darker tones and deep expressions of color, but his skills were more centered in watercolors.
When he painted out in the city, he could feel his interest expand, the way he saw the world as a combination of landscapes of people of the things they made.
Lee's ideas about art were shaped in part by his teacher, Millard Sheets, a watercolorist who was only four years his senior.
Though California was far from the centers of art, Sheets was spearheading a movement to turn aside from modern influences, to use watercolors instead, to document California life, particularly hardships experienced during the Depression.
images, combined figures, and landscapes into documentary presentations of regional life.This movement would eventually be called California Scene Painting.
Sheets was so influential as a young artist that in 1927, during his final years as an art student, Nelbert Chenard had hired him to teach at the Institute as well.
Three years later, as a first-year student, Lee believed that a mentorship with Sheets offered the best path forward in terms of finding some artistic notoriety that everyone in his family could define as success.
This was decidedly a different path than that of Preston.In the spring of 1931, when Preston graduated, he found work as a relatively new type of commercial artist.
He worked as an animator under Walter Lance at Universal, who was then making musical cartoons featuring Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.
I entered the film business as a means of making a living," he explained, just like some youngsters get a job at a gas station or some summer job to make money.
Initially, he saw it as little more than a temporary way to support himself until magazines began to publish his work.I didn't take cartoon art seriously," he added. But over time, he started to see that there were opportunities here.
He saw that the world of magazine illustration was already crowded with older and more established artists like his teacher Pruitt Carter.
But animation, at least as it existed then in California, was still expanding with interesting possibilities ahead.
He also understood that the Universal outfit, with the stale and somewhat derivative Oswald cartoons, was one of the least artistic outfits in the area.He knew, though, that there were more interesting studios nearby.
300 miles north in the small town of Morgan Hill, Mary Robinson's path into art school was far less direct than that of either Lee or Preston.In 1929, Mary Robinson entered San Jose State on scholarship where she studied the fine arts.
This was the closest state college to Morgan Hill, about 20 miles from her house.
At the time the university was formally called the San Jose State Teachers College, she enrolled as a technical student, which meant that she focused on art skills that would lead to a related career.
Shortly after arriving, though, her career goal shifted to that of being an arts instructor, perhaps at a high school.This likely seemed a reasonable career choice with a reliable salary.
But as she continued with her studio classes, she saw that there were larger and more interesting opportunities for artists out in the world.
At San Jose State, she painted portraits of her friends and also of notable college teachers and administrators, including the campus president, Dr. T.W.McQuarrie.
Her watercolors from this period show a mastery of washes, the way she managed light and shadow. She was also experimenting in small ways with unique color combinations.More significantly, she was able to arrange complex emotions into her paintings.
In one self-portrait, she painted herself sitting on the edge of a bed, wearing a floral robe over a yellow dress. Near her, brushes rest in a jar producing cherry-toned swirls in the water.
Light slants onto her face as she looks out from the image, her eyes dark, her mouth arranged into a slight pout, as though she were trying to understand her future.
These elements, a teenaged girl isolated, her eyes searching, her expressions serious, would, many years later, become key elements that she incorporated into her early concept paintings for Walt Disney's Cinderella.
While talking with instructors and other students, Mary came to understand options beyond the local teacher's college and beyond teaching itself.There were people out there who loved art in the same way that she did.
Early in 1931, she applied to art school and over summer, she received a scholarship to the Chouinard Art Institute. The scholarship was only for one year, but she hoped to win another once she was there.
That fall, just two months shy of her 20th birthday, she moved away from family, placing herself in a position where, for the first time, she'd need to support herself.
As the country was moving into the third year of the Depression, Chouinard was adapting to assist out-of-town students in finding accommodations and jobs.The person who took on this role was Althea Ubler, the school's registrar.
She tended to recommend the Three Arts Club as a place for female students to live just a few blocks from campus.
She also pointed out places where they might get exercise at no cost, such as the municipal tennis courts, and showed them the campus art store where they would buy paint, pens, paper, and canvas.
Though tuition was covered by the scholarship, each student would need to spend about $50 for their yearly art supplies.Students were also given advice as to where they might find work.
One of the most popular locations was a small theater a couple miles from campus that presented seasonal and touring productions called Theater Mart.This was where Mary found work alongside other Chouinard students.
At times, the theater held dinner programs.Mary worked, as one friend recalled, as a barmaid, likely in violation of prohibition.
In terms of her studies, she enrolled as an illustration student, which was one of those concentrations that led to a commercial career.Her mentor was Pruitt Carter, whose classes were often limited to 10 or 12 students.
Her goal was to create art that might be featured in publications or perhaps even in advertising. Carter emphasized both artistic and dramatic unity.
He handed students previously published stories, perhaps 10 or 20 years old, and then asked them to produce art to illustrate the material as though they were employed by a magazine.
For historically-based short stories, he required students to perform research so the illustrations would match the time period in which the tale was set.
He advised that illustrators must live the part of each character, must do the scenery, design the costumes, and handle the lighting effects.
Their illustrations must be deeper than a poster, for they must make their characters live and breathe and react to each other as the author intended.
These were almost surely some of the early assignments that Mary engaged as she moved from a teaching college to one focused on creating working artists.
As with other students, far from home for the first time, Mary experimented with what her life might hold.She kept her quiet religious values but also looked for something more in the world.
She explored the city, she bought fabric and made clothes that others found extremely appealing. This was a skill she had picked up from her mother.She attended parties hosted by other students.
Classmate Frank Thomas recalled that one of the first times he saw her, she was drunk passed out at a Chouinard party.She was sort of pretty lying under the bush that way. He looked at her there sleeping outside.
He noticed that she looked like a painter's model.He admired how stylish she was before he went back into the party.It was at Shannard where she had her first big romance. She met a young man, also interested in the commercial arts.
Their romance blossomed hot and quickly, and within months, they were engaged.His name was Dale Owen, a serious student who wanted to make money from his skills, perhaps in advertising.
During this time, however, Mary's views on art were beginning to change.
Though she'd entered Chouinard to be a commercial artist, she became interested in classes that explored art for art's sake, classes directed at the fine arts, filled with people who wanted to express themselves or capture the depth of their world through drawing or painting.
It was there that she met Lee Blair. Though they were nearly the same age, Lee was more advanced in his studies as he had entered Chenard directly from high school.Lee was tall, outgoing, very handsome.
He had a soft, inviting voice and was extremely serious about his work. Following the example of his mentor, Millard Sheets, he believed that watercolors slanting toward realism could be used to capture the mood in California during the Depression.
This was also something now that was beginning to interest Mary.According to a friend, Mary Robinson could see the difference between the two men easily her current fiance, Dale Owen, and her new interest, Lee Blair.
Both were talented, but Dale was more interested in making money, while Lee was focused on the importance of art for its own sake.Lee was also interested in making a name for himself.
At this point in her life, Mary, too, felt the somber pull of the fine arts. She broke the engagement with Dale to go with Lee, Alice Davis explained.
This would be a decision that would shape the rest of her life, both in terms of her art and her ambitions, a decision that would give her both some opportunities and tremendous limitations as she slowly moved toward becoming one of the best known
mid-century artist in America, an artist who in many ways would leave her mark on films and other projects produced by Walt Disney. I'll be back next week with a new episode.
The plan right now, assuming there's no crazy Disney-related news this coming week, is to continue our story of Mary Blair, a person who many believe was Walt's favorite artist. Lastly, as you know, we're an ad-free, listener-supported podcast.
We do just two things, deep dives on stories related to the history of the Disney Studio and the parks, and news and analysis of current events as they relate to the Disney Company.
We are funded entirely by listener contributions, specifically by listeners like you who join us over on Bandcamp as monthly subscribers.On Bandcamp, you'll find over 300 episodes not available on iTunes or anywhere else.
But the absolute best reason to join us there is to support the work we do here and to make sure that this podcast can continue to exist. You can support us by becoming a monthly subscriber over at dhipodcast.bandcamp.com.
I'll also leave a link down in the show notes.So, until next Sunday, this is Todd James Pierce.
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