I love her use of bright colors and marker as a medium. The texture, combined with the repetition of shapes makes this series of illustrations simple, yet rich.
(This particular piece is my Twitter background, until I can find the time to make a huge version of the DLB guillotine)
Via.
Nothing too revelatory for the BlogLESS regular here, but I thought I'd offer you a little story. This all happened in about ten minutes last Friday, and in those minutes, I found myself mentally reinforcing a few key maxims for web design.
Truly one of my favorite illustrators. I really admire Blair's grasp of color.
Her palettes start with these natural, desaturated colors that she layers over with bright, decidedly unreal hues. Everything ends up being so well-balanced on the page. It gives her pieces this great blend of the mundane and the fantastic.
Most of all, I dig Blair's forms: that strong, yet fluid, "gestural geometry" I find so appealing in artists like Modigliani and Matisse and in contemporary illustrators like Bruce Timm. (I think it speaks to the architect in me.)
Cynics might dismiss her work as "cute", but Mary Blair was ahead of her time. Look at all the work today that is inspired by Disney animation --Pixar, for example. Blair's legacy is a part of that.
For more examples of Blair's work, check out these collections on Flickr and Drawn!.
I spent a good part of this morning watching John Berger's 1972 television series Ways of Seeing (nod to Click Opera).
Ways of Seeing follows from a line of thought set forth in Walter Benjamin's canonical 1936 essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Summarily, with the advent of art's mechanical reproducibility, and the development of forms of art (such as film) in which there is no original, the experience of art is freed from place and ritual and instead brought under the gaze and control of a mass audience, leading to a shattering of the object d'art's "aura" - its ability to produce awe and reverence in a viewer.
