ART -- MOON WALKS

Astronaut paints out of this world

Retired astronaut Alan Bean is the only artist among the 12 men who have walked on the moon and his depictions of the Apollo missions go on display at the LBJ Library this week

By Denise Gamino
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Sunday, September 28, 2008

HOUSTON — Alan Bean knows how to hold a moonbeam in his hand.

The first time he did so was in 1969 with his hands encased in giant astronaut gloves with baby blue fingertips. He was frolicking on the moon almost a quarter of a million miles from Earth as the fourth human to experience the lunar landscape.

Now he captures moonbeams in all their poetic glory in his painter's studio flooded with sunlight from windows of all shapes and sizes. His studio is in the back half of his Houston home, near the banks of leaf-shrouded Buffalo Bayou a few miles from Interstate 10.

Bean is an American artist as unique as his paintings of human behavior on the moon.

Only 12 men have walked on the moon. Bean is the only egg in the dozen to break out of the rocket science shell and spread artistic career wings.

He is America's cosmic artist, the one and only authentic witness who can translate in a visual way what it feels like to be a human being on another celestial body in our galaxy.

"If I didn't do this, it would never be done," says Bean, who is 76 and flew on Apollo 12. "Nobody else can do it. It's me or nobody."

On Wednesday, Bean's lunar landscapes, which are gently informed by Claude Monet's impressionist work, go on display at the LBJ Library and Museum as part of the museum's exhibit on space exploration that opened last month. The 12 mythic paintings, some as large as 48 inches by 34 inches and worth as much as $160,000, can be viewed through April 24. (A poster from one of Bean's paintings and his "Apollo" art book will be sold at the library's gift shop.)

Bean's various paintings of the six Apollo missions in 1969-72 are special not just for what they depict, but for the materials used to texture their surface. Look closely and you can spot the slight, three-dimensional footprint of a moon boot just like one Bean wore when he walked, bounced and even tripped and fell on the moon's surface nearly 40 years ago. Bean surely is the only artist who just happened to have a moon boot in his closet.

Other surprises from the cosmos are embedded in Bean's paintings, which on the back explain the mission depicted. Those triangular scratch marks? Made by the shiny silver hammer Bean used to drive the American flag's pole into the moon's crust and to collect samples of moon dirt. Those penny-sized circles? From the small round bit at the end of Bean's lunar core sampling tube.

"I was supposed to throw it away but I put it in my (spacesuit) pocket," he said. His early paintings had texture made by a painter's palette knife until Bean had a better idea. "One day I said, 'Why am I using these tools? I've got tools no artists have.' "

The distressed surfaces symbolize the unpolished and rough surface of the moon. Bean calls it "putting the moon's stamp on my paintings."

His grand finale is sprinkling moon dust into the landscapes. Bean had hoped to be given a souvenir moon rock, but NASA reserved those for museums and foreign heads of state. However, he was given the NASA insignia, Apollo 12 mission patch, and a small U.S. flag that adorned his spacesuit on the moon. The keepsakes were framed on the wall of Bean's home office when he noticed they still had black moon dust clinging to them. Though the framed package was worth $900,000 or more, according to Bean, he decided to cut the patches in half, leaving part of each one in the framed display and taking the other half to cut up into tiny pieces to embed, along with the gunpowderlike dust, in his paintings.

Bean never thought of art while his lunar module was parked on the moon for 32 hours in November 1969. "I was just trying to be the best astronaut I could be," he says. His playful side slipped out when he made sure he was the first astronaut to eat spaghetti on the moon. But his big plan to use a timer on a camera to capture a self-portrait of him and fellow astronaut Peter Conrad fizzled when he couldn't find the timing device hidden in a bag filled with moon rocks.

Bean was born in 1932 in Wheeler, a small town on the eastern edge of the Texas Panhandle. As a boy, he dreamed of becoming a pilot and spent hours making model airplanes. He always chose the prettiest planes. He attended the University of Texas at Austin, where he joined the Naval ROTC and graduated in 1955 with a degree in aeronautical engineering. He became a Navy pilot assigned to a jet attack squadron in Jacksonville, Fla. One day, the pilots were told they could help create the new design to paint on the outside of the planes. Bean was so excited he went home and spent all evening drawing designs. The next day he was surprised to see he was the only pilot to submit designs. "What's wrong with everyone else?" he remembers asking himself, not realizing his creative drive was unusual.

Bean was promoted to test pilot at the Patuxent River flight center in Maryland. In his off hours, he began art classes at nearby St. Mary's College.

Bean became an astronaut in 1963. He not only flew to the moon, but was the spacecraft commander on the second Skylab mission, a 59-day trip to the orbiting space station Skylab in 1973. (He flew with Owen Garriott, father of Austin resident and video game inventor Richard Garriott, who is training for a civilian trip to the International Space Station on Oct. 12). Bean then was backup commander of the Apollo-Soyuz mission that joined American and Soviet space crews in space for the first time in 1975.

As America launched its space shuttle program, Bean was in the middle of the action and had a good chance to be one of the shuttle commanders on a flight.

But Bean stunned NASA by retiring in 1981 after the shuttle's first flight. He was ready to become a full-time artist; he had been painting the moon since 1974 and could no longer deny that his artistic soul yearned for equal time with his scientific mind. When he told his boss, the official fell back in his chair and only a wall 3 feet behind him kept him from falling to the floor, Bean said, still laughing about it today.

"I was an astronaut who was longing to be an artist," he said.

Bean threw himself into his art work, taking classes at the Museum of Fine Art, Houston and attending workshops. His early work shows monochromatic renderings of the moon's desolate landscape. But as he evolved as an artist, Bean realized he needed colors to convey the emotions of experiencing life outside the Earth. He wanted accurate but beautiful paintings.

He gravitated toward Monet's works, and traveled to the great artist's home in Giverny, France. He noticed the lily pond water was gray-green, not the many hues of the paintings famous around the world. He also went to Rouen, France, and visited the cathedral that Monet painted so many times, visiting at different times of day. He realized that Monet had taken artistic license with color to translate emotional reality.

"It seems strange to me now that I had to go all the way to France to understand that in an artist's vision, the way he or she chooses to see things is not the same as what he or she actually sees," Bean says in his intriguing 1998 art memoir, "Apollo: An Eyewitness Account by Astronaut/Explorer Artist/ Moonwalker Alan Bean."

Monet "helped me understand that an artist's value to the world is to help all of us experience more fully, feel more connected to beauty, and become more completely human than we could without art."

Bean began using subtle hues of violet, greenish blue, yellow, orange and even red to paint the moon, realizing that "both beauty and realism are possible with these color combinations."

He remains devoted to accuracy, however, and uses a strong spotlight and homemade 10-inch astronaut models that look like Barbie and Ken in spacesuits to help him calculate shadows and reflections in space helmet visors.

Bean has completed 162 paintings and nearly all of them tell a story that "depicts what humans do when they go to places they've never been."

He collects anecdotes and special memories from his moonwalking posse and tries to preserve those slices of life from an alien orb. He even paints some of the actions astronauts wish they had taken. Gene Cernan is wistful that he didn't take time to carve his daughter's name, Tracy, into the lunar crust, where it would stay for eons. Bean painted that picture, saving Cernan, he said, the trouble of having to return to the moon. ("Tracy's Boulder" is part of the LBJ exhibit). And that self-portrait that Bean and Conrad never got because of the lost self-timer? It's captured in acrylic paint for posterity now. There's also a picture of Bean and Conrad giving a high-five on the moon, a gesture of euphoria they never made but one they certainly experienced.

Bean hopes to paint at least 250 paintings, so he has 88 more to go. He paints every day in two shifts, from 8 to 11:30 a.m. and again from 4 to 6:30 p.m. Elvis or bluegrass music fills the air and underfoot run the two Lhasa Apos that he and his wife, Leslie, who founded the patient advocacy office at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, consider a central part of the family. Fudgie Wudgie and Puff Wuff, their long tawny hair brushing the wood floor, keep Bean company in the solitude his art requires.

Telling the visual and emotional histories of humans on the moon fulfills Bean. He brings to art the same hard work, devotion and ambition that he put into being an astronaut. And he doesn't plan to stop anytime soon.

"I've got more stories to tell than life I've got left," he said.

Bean's final frontier keeps him Earthbound, but he's doing the one single thing that only he can do for America and its space program.

dgamino@statesman.com; 445-3675

Alan Bean's moon paintings

What: new addition to exhibit "To the Moon: The American Space Program in the 1960s"

When: paintings on display October 1 through April 24

Where: LBJ Library and Museum, 2313 Red River St., UT

Information: 721-0200, http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu, alanbean.com

Postponed: A planned panel discussion and astronauts reception including Bean will be scheduled later.