Astronaut Art

Alan Bean was one of the first four men on the moon but in his retirement he has turned to more creative pursuits, painting astronauts and space art. But it is patronising to reduce them down into these terms. Alan Bean uses his own lunar tools, ones which have scraped the surface of the moon, to recreate the craggy alien surfaces that his paintings are built upon. Using a pick axe employed to take samples of the moons surface and the moon boots he wore on the moon, he has carved and sculpted the canvases to give a rugged geographical texture – creating a footprint painting or an almost acrylic rubbing on the moon. It’s as if the lunar surface itself has been excavated to find these images.

            This personal experience may seem cliché somehow, even using his moon boots is a bit too nostalgically sickly, but his art is wholly original in the process. Bean has a one up on any space artists because he turns his canvases not only into sympathetic depictions of the loneliness and intrigue of space, but scientific reports with collected evidence. This contrast between the logical and emotional shows how the emotion of seeing alien surroundings could possibly override the reason of visiting the environment in the first place.

            The three dimensional qualities of these pieces give them a spooky resonance, a poignant depiction of isolation and discovery. The darker tones, inky blues and creepy greys, build up the ominous feel contrasted with the startling white of the explorer’s suits. A contradiction of a material honed on earth and the dusty natural surface is highlighted by this colour disparity. At face value, these paintings are stunning enough, capturing the audience with the mysterious flare of the astronaut’s helmet and the suggestive darkness of space. When you look deeper, realising that all these paintings have minute amounts of moon dust in them, have stamps of moon boots which has graced the surface the moon, they suddenly gain a deeper quality. These stamps of lunar life give deeper insight into activity on the moon than any satellite picture could.