Plain and simple, Mary Blair is my favorite artist. Her wonderfully colorful and childlike art is candy to the eye. In the book, "Before the Animation Begins: The Art and Lives of Disney Inspirational Sketch Artists" (Hyperion Press, 1996), author John Canemaker writes of Blair: Her work brings to mind twentieth-century American artists, such as Stuart Davis, Milton Avery, and Adolph Gottlieb, more readily than Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, or Kay Nielsen, the fin-de-siécle Euro-book illustrators so favored by Walt Disney in the 1930s. If she is to be likened to Europeans, it is to the moderns who found an inner (rather than an outer) reality by playing with form and color: Wassily Kandinsky's early figurative expressionism, the Fauvism of Henri Matisse and Raoul Duy, the "impish laughter" of Paul Klee One would reasonably expect that Walt ran in horror from her work and she lasted at the studio for the same length as an ice cube on a July sidewalk. But art is not reasonable and its effect on the human mind and spirit is beyond logic: Walt Disney loved Mary Blair's art.