Friday, June 26, 2009

Alan Bean: A Moonwalker's Artistic view

Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean has become an artist whose painting of the space program have fetched up to $175,000. For Bean, though, any commercial success is unimportant. What matters is capturing the days we set foot on another world. As this article in the NYT puts it,
"He has had to give up the hyper-rational way of seeing the world he had learned as a Navy test pilot and engineer. He has trained himself to see things not as they are but as they feel to him, to translate emotions into colors and to resist his scientific urges."
Bean builds models of every scene he paints to get shadows and other physical features just right, but he varies his palette to try to convey the feelings each scene inspires.
COMMENT: It works.

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