Astronaut Alan Bean’s paintings make the moon look like New Mexico (link)

Cosmic Log : The right-brained astronaut:

“To do art well, you’ve got to be kind of holistic and look at everything at once,” Bean said. “It’s different. You don’t stay alive as an astronaut or a pilot looking at everything at once. You better be a serial kind of guy.”

If you have been following my previous posts about the right- and left-brain, then you’ll appreciate this article about Alan Bean, one of 12 earth beings to walk on the moon (that we know of, at least). In the interview he talks about his post-astronaut career as a painter and the different functions of the brain. In essence, you need your left-brain to operate a spacecraft, but the right-brain to paint it.

I’m not much of an art critic, but there is something intriguing about Bean’s paintings. If you click here you can see some of the work (though I warn you the Website is a huge, disorganized mess– so much for rocket science!). My mental map of the moon has always been through photography, so I find the paintings to have a psychological quality that is quite different and strangely religious, displaying both a love for the moon, but for science as well.

The painterly style is reminiscent of cowboy art, something as a punk rock youth I totally abhorred, but in my sunset years I have come to appreciate. Bean’s landscapes are like the New Mexico desert, extending the wild frontier myth to space. Like cowboy art, these images portray fairly mundane activities that are designed to foreground the environment. In the above image humans look rather small.

On his Website he states that acrylics are space age:

Bean prefers to paint his motifs with acrylics, because acrylics are as high tech as his subjects. Although developed in the 19th century, acrylics occurred first on the art scene during the beginning space age and are the most important innovation in artistic materials since the invention of oil paints.

Additionally, “the base layer of all of his paintings contain small pieces of his space suit and the command module and also very small amounts of Moon dust.”

He covers his painting surfaces with acrylic modeling paint so he can put a space boot print on the surface along with imprints of the geology hammer he used on his mission. So not only does he make representations of the moon, the paintings themselves become the moon and the record of his experience. Way cool!

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