Recently there was a television series about some treasure hunters out west having found an old map that they thought would lead them to a long lost gold mine. The program featured them searching across rocky landscapes, seeking the lost mine. The scenery where the treasure hunters were venturing looked much like some of the scenes once painted by Columbus native and long time Disney animation effects director, Josh Meador.
The television images and story brought to mind something Phil Meador, Josh’s son, once told me. Often, Josh would take his wife, Elizabeth (Josh was married to Elizabeth Alston, his high school sweetheart from Columbus), and Phil and the family dog on weekend trips in their station wagon with a teardrop trailer in tow. Elizabeth and Phil would go walking, while Josh, with the dog for company, would go into the country side and paint or draw. Josh especially loved drawing or painting the rugged beauty of Nevada’s “Valley of Fire,” where he would sometimes even hunt for storied lost treasure.
From the late 1930s through the 1950s animation experienced its golden age, with Walt Disney Studios its foremost practitioner. At Disney, Columbus native Josh Meador supervised effects animation. He was best known for his creative visual effects in Walt Disney productions such as “Bambi,” “Fantasia,” “Cinderella” and “Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea.” Meador was a sequence director for “Make Mine Music” that won first place for animation at the 1946 Cannes Film Festival and was co-winner of the 1954 Oscar for special effects for his work on “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” (at that time technical Oscars were presented in the name of the studio, not the individual).
Meador was considered one of Disney Studio’s most talented artists and has been called one of five “most notable effects animators in history.” In 1954, MGM asked Walt Disney to lend them his “best effects man” to help with the special effects in its ground-breaking science fiction movie “Forbidden Planet.” Disney sent them Meador.
Josh Meador, however, did much more than just animation. Meador was a noted artist in his own right. He had a lifelong love affair with art. His mediums covered the spectrum from pastels to ink washes to pen and ink to oils. He drew posters for the U.S. Forest Service and was one of the first artists to use Smokey Bear to promote forest fire prevention. His oil paintings of California scenes won many awards and fifty of his works were included in Walt Disney’s personal collections.
In the late 1950s, Josh was an effects animator working on the Disney feature, “Sleeping Beauty.” To publicize the upcoming release of the movie in 1959, Walt Disney devoted one of his weekly television programs to “Adventures in Art” with a segment titled “4 Artist Paint 1 Tree,” It featured four animators, one being Meador, who were working on “Sleeping Beauty.” Disney called them not just Disney animators but artists with “national reputations.” Disney described their their work on “Sleeping Beauty,” and then showed them while describing their style of painting as they each painted the same tree.
Josh won many awards in jury shows for his landscapes executed in oils. And though most of his major exhibits were on the west coast, one exhibit was at the National Academy of Design. When he would return home to Columbus for visits he still enjoyed painting and drawing. The Meador family has given the Columbus Lowndes Public Library a painting he did of the old and now demolished Stockard House and drawings of three other Columbus houses including Temple Heights and the Harris-Wade house. Both of those houses were across the street from Meador’s childhood home,
In 1965, at age 55, Josh Meador died of a heart attack at his home in Caspar, California. Shortly before his death he had completed a painting for President Lyndon Johnson and had been designated as the artist for NASA’s Apollo Moon Landing program.
The Walt Disney Family Museum in California recently had an exhibit of art work by Walt’s “artist friends.” The seven featured artists ranged from Norman Rockwell to Josh Meador. The Meador painting on exhibit was Disney’s “Smoke Tree Ranch,” which had hung in Walt Disney’s office. The painting even shows up hanging in Disney’s office in last year’s hit movie, “Saving Mr Banks.” That painting is closely tied to a painting given to Columbus by the Meador family and which hangs in the lobby of the Columbus Convention and Visitors Bureau.
Disney had a Meador painting of his Smoke Tree Ranch hanging in his office and, according to Phil Meador, another hanging in one of his homes. When Walt died the Disney family kept the ranch painting that hung in the office but gave the ranch painting that had hung in a residence to Mrs Meador. In turn, the Meador family gave the painting “Cloud Patterns” to Columbus. Through the generosity of the Meador family, people in Columbus have the rare gift of a painting by Josh Meador of Walt Disney’s ranch that had been owned by Walt Disney and hung in one of Disney’s residences.
For anyone interested in reading more about Josh Meador’s paintings or even buying one, I would suggest visiting the web site of the Bodega Bay Heritage Gallery in California. The gallery owners are good people, friends of the Meador family and handle the sale of paintings for the Meador estate. Their web site is found at: bbhgallery.com.
Rufus Ward is a Columbus native a local historian. E-mail your questions about local history to Rufus at [email protected].
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