Golden Book: Mary Blair's Baby's House

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 3 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great posts about Golden Book illustrators.


Earlier, we featured Mary Blair's Golden Book "Little Verses" in two postings ( Part One / Part Two ). Today, we feature her long out-of-print book, "Baby's House".

I'm always interested in the observations of artists regarding the work I post, so I asked Clarke Snyder of Inspiration Grab Bag to put together a few lines to introduce this gallery of images. Here is what he had to say...

"Baby's House" is heavily infused with Mary Blair's signature blend of charm, appeal and delightful child-like spirit that has made her an inspirational icon to artists, designers, and animators. In this book however, she seems to forgo her typical pattern-heavy, decorative approach with its strong and dream-like colors for a much more subdued and natural palette. The combination of bold simplistic shapes, subtle color harmonies and minimal decoration evoke a feeling of comfort and familairity that one would expect to find in a typical home full of commonplace fixtures and objects.

Blair doesn't deviate too far from her norm though... This book is obviously loaded with her lush, well placed brushwork-- whether in a bold textured stroke or a delicate detail. I absolutely love the one image of the baby wrapped up in the towel after the bath. It's brimming with such beautiful simplicity. The depth she creates with negative space amazes me, and the bold use of texture to form creates that familiar feeling of a nice clean fluffy towel after a bath or shower.

Blair's appealing sense of design and compostion also figure prominently throughout each and every page of this book. The Baby seems to bounce around and jump all over the pages, full of life and movement-- so much so that you might swear that the playful tyke was actually animated.

It's no wonder that Mary Blair continues to be such an influential and revered artist amongst so many of todays top artists. --Clarke Snyder




















Many thanks to Mike Fontanelli, who loaned us his Giant Golden Book copy of this book to digitize.

For more beautiful artwork by Mary Blair, see... Little Verses Part One, Part Two and The New Golden Song Book Part One , Part Two and Part Three.

See also... Bozo and his Rocket Ship, Rojankovsky's Frog Went A Courting, Tibor Gergely's A Day In The Jungle, Gustaf Tenggren's The Little Trapper, Uncle Remus Stories Part One and Part Two, and Huckleberry Hound Builds A House.

Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

6.13.08
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