Mary Blair in Mexico: A Closer Look at Her Saludos Amigos Watercolor

Mary Blair, concept art for Saludos Amigos, watercolor and oil pastel on paper, 1943. Collection of the Walt Disney Family Museum.

Have you ever seen one of Mary Blair’s watercolors up close?

If you have, you’ll know there’s something absolutely magical about the way she worked with color, light, and movement. She is, without a doubt, one of the best Disney artists.

Poster for Saludos Amigos, 1943.

Mary Blair in Mexico

One of my personal favorites comes from her time in Mexico, created as concept art for Disney’s 1943 film Saludos Amigos. Blair, along with a team of other Disney artists, traveled through Latin America in the early 1940s as part of the “Good Neighbor” cultural exchange program. The journey inspired a body of work that blended her distinctive modernist style with the textures, colors, and patterns she encountered.

Trajineras at Xochimilco, near Mexico City. Photo: © Dr. Lauren Kilroy-Ewbank.

This particular watercolor depicts the vibrant trajineras, or the flat-bottomed boats that glide along the canals of Xochimilco near Mexico City. These boats navigate through the chinampas, or the floating gardens first developed by the Mexica (Aztecs) centuries ago to grow crops on shallow lake beds. If you visit Xochimilco today, you can still ride a trajinera, drifting past gardens, music-filled boats, and food vendors. It’s one of the few places where you can experience Aztec engineering and urban planning.

Mary Blair, detail of concept art for Saludos Amigos, watercolor and oil pastel on paper, 1943. Collection of the Walt Disney Family Museum.

In Blair’s hands, the trajineras become almost dreamlike. With a few quick, confident brushstrokes, she captures figures in motion, water shimmering under the hulls, and a lush landscape that feels both specific to Mexico and yet timeless.

Mary Blair, detail of concept art for Saludos Amigos, watercolor and oil pastel on paper, 1943. Collection of the Walt Disney Family Museum.

One detail I love? The trees in the background. They echo the vertical elegance of certain Chinese or Japanese landscape paintings, especially those tied to Zen Buddhist traditions, where a few well-placed lines suggest the weight of a mountain or the bend of a branch. Blair may not have been consciously referencing East Asian art here, but her compositional choices hint at a cross-cultural visual language that values suggestion over strict realism. I have a feeling she was aware, especially with Bambi out in 1942, where artist Tyrus Wong's indebtedness to East Asian painting techniques and aesthetics was on display.

Mary Blair, detail of concept art for Peter Pan, watercolor. Collection of the Walt Disney Family Museum.

It’s a perfect example of why Mary Blair’s work still resonates today: she distilled a scene down to its essential shapes and colors while retaining its emotional impact. Whether she was painting the canals of Xochimilco or the whimsical worlds of Peter Pan, her work balances modernist abstraction with respect for the places and cultures she depicted.

Stay tuned for more posts about Mary Blair in Mexico!