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Astronaut Art Made With Moon Dust
Associated Press/AP Online via Yellowbrix
November 08, 2009
New Haven, CT – There may be many artists, but only one can lay claim to having stepped on the surface of a heavenly body. Astronaut Alan Bean couldn’t be prouder of his career as an astronaut on the 1969 Apollo 12 moon mission, but that was then. Now, he’s an artist whose historic past achievements in space have made him a singular sensation in what he does best — painting. The result of his concentrated effort in that dimension, have just been released in a spectacular Smithsonian Institution book in celebration of the mission’s 40th anniversary this month: “Alan Bean: Painting Apollo, First Artist on Another World.” He’ll be signing and showing works from it, Saturday at 4 p.m. at The Greenwich Workshop Galley, 151 Main St., which has represented him in selling limited edition prints of his works for nearly a decade. An exhibit of select works will be on display Friday through Nov. 20.
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Bean, 77, speaking by phone from the studio in his Houston home, admits that, if it hadn’t been for the urging of fellow astronauts in the early 1980s, he might still be painting flowers and landscapes.
“I never thought one single time about painting the moon. When I got back, I continued to paint landscapes and flowers. That was what art was. My astronaut friends said, ‘Why aren’t you painting the moon? You’re the first artist to go there.’ “Finally, I ran out of flowers one weekend and I got out a picture of Pete Conrad and painted it. After a few hours, I thought, ‘I should be doing this. I know everything about that suit, every valve, every fold.’ Don’t forget, I love art and was always looking at Monet or Van Gogh, and they weren’t painting spacesuits.”
Although he had taken art courses over the years, studying at such places as the Museum of Fine Arts at Houston, and painted since his test pilot days in the 1960s, Bean was a closet artist while with NASA, where he flew the November 1969 Apollo mission, and became the fourth man to walk on the moon; the 59-day Skylab mission; and trained backup for the Apollo-Soyuz.
jasonmetcalf
3 months ago
154 comments
That is pretty cool that he uses his space tools and moon dust to make his art. It seems pretty conceptually consistent to do that. Also interesting that he left NASA just to make art. Pretty cool!