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Paintings of Another World by an artist who was actually there.
As the Lunar Module Pilot of Apollo 12, Alan Bean was the fourth man to set foot on the moon. He explored the beautifully desolate landscape of the Ocean of Storms and later, as commander of Skylab Mission II, Alan spent 59 days in orbit around our fragile, blue-and-white Earth.
Alan had been painting earthbound subjects for many years by the time he began training to pilot the space shuttle, but his fellow astronauts convinced him to paint his experiences on the moon.
“You can create the very first paintings in all of history of a place other than our own planet,” they said. “Your paintings will forever be the first paintings of the many other worlds humans will visit as the centuries unfold.”
Because of this unprecedented opportunity and challenge, Alan resigned from NASA in 1981 to devote all of his time and energy to painting.
Over the years, Alan's art has evolved into a mixture of painting and sculpture, textured with lunar tools, sprinkled with bits of Apollo spacecraft and a touch of moon dust. You can see many of Alan Bean's paintings on this site and read more about the space-age techniques and materials used in his work. (Copyright Alan Bean)
There is a bit of magic in every recent Alan Bean original, starting with a trace of actual moondust from the patches and insignias on his Apollo spacesuit.
Alan grew up and lived in Texas and attended R. L. Paschal High School in Fort Worth, Texas.
His caring mother Frances had the most profound influence on Alan. She coached him through his daily chores, taught him how to iron and mend his clothes, and a hundred other things.
Alan majored in Aeronautical Engineering at the University of Texas and competed in gymnastics and diving. It was here that Alan was introduced to the most just law of life:
“If a person will give their best efforts every day, planning and working towards their dreams, in a surprisingly short time they will notice that they have actually moved in the right direction and they will feel that they are not exactly the person they were at the outset but a different person, more like the one they need to be and want to be to accomplish their dreams.”
It is this law that has made all the difference and Alan continues to use it every single day.
The sights, sounds and smells of a high performance flying machine just felt right to Alan. He enjoyed being catapulted off of--and then landing on--aircraft carriers, formation flying, bombing, gunnery, all of it. Alan loved everything about being a naval aviator.
After his tour-of-duty, Alan went to the Navy Test Pilot School where his intructor was Pete Conrad, who would later become the Commander of the Apollo 12 mission and Alan's fellow moonwalker.
Alan Bean was a test pilot when John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth. To Alan, flying a spacecraft at 25,000 miles-per-hour at an altitude of 100 miles was vastly more appealing than flying an airplane at 600 miles-per-hour at an altitude of 5 miles above the Earth.
Alan set his sights higher.
Apollo was an impossible dream. To get to the moon and return safely we worked, prayed, and cheered together as a world. Together we made an impossible dream come true.
"I was fortunate to be the first artist with the opportunity to be in the center of the action to capture what I saw and felt, and bring it back to earth to share with generations to come. It is my dream that on the wings of my paintbrush many people will see what I saw and feel what I felt, walking on another world some 240,000 miles from my studio here on planet earth.
I believe my paintings are beautiful and important art. It is art not of the distant past, but art of our time. Art we can understand, important art to us and our descendants because we were there as history was made.
Some of the tools I used on the moon are the same tools I use to create my uniquely textured surface. With careful observation you can see the imprints of Moonboots walking across the painting. These Moonprints are just like the ones we Apollo astronauts made as we went about our explorations. When you take a closer look you will see marks from the same hammer I used to chip off rock fragments for return to Earth. There are also circular marks made by a sharpened core tube bit I drove two meters into the lunar surface to collect several layers of soil.
With an even more careful inspection you can find small pieces of foil that provided insulation on the hatch between our Command Module Yankee Clipper and our Lunar Module Intrepid. You can also find pieces of the American flag, name tag, and NASA and Apollo 12 mission emblems that I wore on my space suit. These became covered with dust as I walked and worked on the lunar surface so within each painting are minute amounts of Moondust from the Ocean of Storms
It is with these techniques and artifacts that I create paintings with truly out-of-this-world texture, unique in all of art history. Texture with impressions of moonboots and hammer and core tube bit marks, to further amplify the feeling of actually being there.
Along the way, I have been inspired by other explorer artists such as Thomas Moran and Albert Bierstadt and Frederick Remington and Charles Russell. As the first artist on another world, I believe I am doing the same thing for the opening of the universe that they did for the opening of the American West, that my painting will satisfy the human need to record and remember new beginnings.
Our generation will be remembered for many achievements, and one of the greatest will be our movement off the Earth, from its gravitational pull, to begin our future generations' exploration of the universe. My paintings record the beginnings of a quest never to end, our journey out among the stars."
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