Mary Blair on Google Doodle

Mary Blair on Google Doodle  

There were the Nine Old Men, Walt Disney’s famed founding animators, and then there was visual stylist Mary Blair.
Along with such legends as Marc Davis, Ollie Johnston, Frank Thomas and Wolfgang Reitherman, Blair worked on the studio’s animated features for more than 20 years — the only woman to have such a prominent role at Disney.

Mary Blair is recognized all over the world. She was one of America’s greatest artists and is best remembered today for work done for The Walt Disney Company. You might not recognize her, but I’m sure you would have heard of the films Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Song of the South, and most famously Cinderella, for which Blair has produced the concept.
She was born on October 21, 1911 in McAlester, Oklahoma. She moved to Texas during her early ages, and later to California when she was about 7 years of age. Mary graduated from San Jose State College and won a scholarship at Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angele. In the year 1934, she married to a notable artist named Lee Blair who had won a gold medal in the art competitions of the Olympic Games for his “Rodeo”. While the fine art she created outside of her association with Disney and her work as an illustrator is not widely known to the public, Blair’s bold and ground-breaking color design still serves as an inspiration to many of today’s contemporary designers and animators.
Google paid homage to her on October 21, 2011 on the 100th anniversary of her birth with a doodle on their homepage.