Mary Blair Ad

I found this in my online travels today and simply had to share! What is better to see while flipping through the ads in a magazine than a two page spread of Mary Blair artistic gorgeousness?! I can’t think of anything!

This ad features one of the two The Spirit of Creative Energies Among Children murals Mary Blair designed for the 1967 New Tomorrowland. This mural was on the north side of Tomorrowland, covering the uppermost portion of the CircleVision-360 building.  I have left this ad LARGE so you can look at it all in all its glory. See below.

It reads:

“Welcome to the bright, new world of telephone communications!

This is the theme… and the promise… of the 88-foot-long mural that greets visitors to the new Bell System Exhibit in the new Tomorrowland at Disneyland, California.

The artist is Mary Blair, well-known illustrator of children’s books and a designer of the ‘it’s a small world’ exhibit at the New York World’s Fair and Disneyland. Miss Blair interpreted the promise of world-wide communications in a colorful tile mosaic of a children’s orchestra sending music to friends in other nations.

But the mural isn’t the only thing that’s new about the Bell System Exhibit. There’s a larger, expanded display area that shows you telephone communications of the future.

Feature of the Exhibit is a Walt Disney film, ‘America the Beautiful’, in CircleVision 360, the motion picture that surrounds you and puts you in the center of the most beautiful scenery in the world. This is the new year to discover America in person. If you and your family get to Disneyland, you’ll be warmly welcomed at our new building in Tomorrowland.”

From Life magazine dated July 7, 1967.

Pieces of the Mural

Seriously. What’s going on with  me? 3 blog posts in the span of a week?! How can this be? Will it keep up? Time will tell. However! I have a post to go with an old post today, which I was inspired to put up since I found photos of my chunks of Mary Blair (which sounds morbid, but I promise it’s not!).

My long time readers might recall a post, which you can find here, detailing the sad destruction, or possibly partial destruction of the fantastic Mary Blair mural in Tomorrowland.

I’m not certain if much of the mural remains, but I know that portions of the destroyed pieces were auctioned off. A friend of mine bought said chunks as a birthday present for me… which, in thinking about it, would be such a bad present for anyone who was not so marinated in Disney as I… and, being a huge Mary Blair fan, I thought they were pretty darn cool! Let’s hope they’re legit. I’ve never heard anything to the contrary about them.

As you can see, they’re relatively thick, seemingly the same thickness as seen in the tiles shown in the photos from my previous post. They’re painted, a bit weathered, but they still have a nice sheen to them. I don’t know what portion of the mural they come from, though I think they probably had residence towards the bottom area.

Here is the backside for anyone interested. It looks like there is some cement or mortar of some sort. I’m not a girl who would know the correct terminology for that. Some goo to make it stick to something else! How about that.

It would please me greatly if they brought the mural back, since they seem to be bringing back everything from our Tomorrowland of the past. Fingers crossed. :) Incidentally, did anyone see the floor in the Mary Blair area of the Walt Disney Family Museum? Fabulous!!! If they made that in rug form, it would be in my house right now!

Must Checko El Groupo.

A happy recommendation today to check out the El Groupo photos of Walt's goodwill trip to South America on Google's Life photos search here. There are four pages of photos to sift through, all of which are wonderful.

The collection highlights a lot of work by Mary & Lee Blair as well as some really nice Herb Ryman paintings.

As an artist, the greatest thing for me (being such huge fans of these remarkable artists) is that a lot of the photos capture the subject in which you see painted by one or more of the artists. A great compare and contrast to learn more about their style, how they saw objects, and their composition. Just a fascinating tour all around. How lucky to be able to roam around new places with a sketchbook, watercolors, and some fantastic artists in your company. Don't miss it!

From the "Things That Should Still Be There" files...

I give you, the deconstruction of the Mary Blair mural in Tomorrowland. Sad photos I just came across in my files. The mural was something I loved so much and I was so sad to see it come down. (I have chunks of it... or so they were given to me as. Never knew if they were real and always doubted they were... but one can hope!) There's not much to say about these, except to say the sweetness was sucked out of Tomorrowland when it went. But, I do look ahead to an eventual wonderful Tomorrowland (one day) that actually has everything to do with tomorrow. That'd rock.

In order to lessen the slightly sad nature of this post however, I will supersize today's post with a bright shot of color with this Mary Blair delight! It's lovely, even off of a wall, isn't it?

Take a Mary Blair Break!

While bopping around YouTube, as I do often, I found this fun little clip from The Three Caballeros. Not one of those Disney films people seem to take much notice of, but it's always been one of my favorites. Many people call it one of Disney's 'throw away' or 'packaged' films but to me it's a fun artistic adventure with really great energy about it that I could just eat! I find myself watching this film on days that have been somewhat drab and mundane. A Monday when it's back to the grind, as they say. It injects some color and vitality into my day that otherwise wouldn't have been present.
One of the driving reasons why I love this film so much is that it's steeped in Mary Blair art. Just watch the clip above. It's fun, it's fanciful, it's dripping with delicious color! It's definitely a sensory thing, and I defy it not to brighten your day!
So click play and suck up the tremendous color and have a delightful day! :D