Alan Bean (1932–2018) grew up loving airplanes. He also loved making beautiful things, beginning with the model planes he hung in his bedroom. He took his " rst painting class in 1961, at the same time that he trained to be a daring navy pilot.
In 1963, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) chose Bean as an astronaut for the new United States space program. After six years of intense physical and scienti " c training, he traveled to the Moon with the Apollo 12 mission. On November 19, 1969, he became only the fourth person to walk on the lunar surface. Bean returned home to a hero’s welcome, with a parade in his honor and congratulations from the president of the United States. He ! ew another mission into space but left NASA in 1981 to work on his paintings. While other astronauts were pilots and scientists, Alan was also an artist—the only one who’d traveled to another world. In his paintings, he hoped to show what it looked like through his eyes.
Science had sent people to the Moon, but Alan knew that art could express how it felt to be up there.
Bean’s paintings combined his skills as a scientist and an artist. He used exact measurements for the details, but he also used imagination to capture the dizzying sensation of walking on the Moon. By sprinkling his paintings with moon dust, scraping them with moon tools, and stamping them with moon boots, he tried to make a direct connection with his experiences in space. As I worked with Alan on this book, I saw how much he valued sharing these experiences with a new generation. By then he was in his 80s, a time when he could have simply rested on his laurels as one of 12 humans to walk on the Moon. Instead, he generously offered to help with the story and to contribute examples of his paintings. I could tell he was passionate about showing young readers what he saw on his fantastic voyage beyond Earth’s orbit.
“I think of myself not as an astronaut who paints,” Alan said, “but as an artist who was once an astronaut.”
—Dean Robbins
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