CHARLES WOOLEY
Astronaut Alan Bean, who died recently, was one of 12 walked men to on have the Moon. On his return, he reinvented vision to himself share as his an cosmic artist
On the night of November 19 in 1969 I was walking along Marieville Esplanade in Sandy Bay near where I was living as a university student. I remember a still, clear night with a large waxing moon. I remember it only for one amazing reason. There were two men at that moment walking on that moon and, although back then I wanted to be a journalist, it never occurred to me that I would ever get to meet one of them.
Only 12 men have walked on the Moon, they are a rapidly diminishing band and the fourth of them, American astronaut Alan Bean, died in Houston recently at the age of 86. He was a spritely 73-year-old artist when I visited him in his studio in 2005 where he was flat out painting what seemed like an endless series of moonscapes. Like his fellow Apollo astronauts, Bean never really came back down to earth. They had taken that “one giant leap” and the rest of life threatened to be an anticlimax unless they found some greater meaning to the profound philosophical shock of standing on an alien rock and looking back at the tiny blue planet earth, lonely and lovely in the dramatic endlessness of the cosmos. Some got religion, others lost their faith, and some went into politics. Some got divorced and some took to the bottle and one oddly enough became a car salesman while yet another opened a restaurant, an enterprise almost as uncertain as a lunar landing.
Alan Bean always had an eye for a picture. He took that celebrated snap of our small planet framed between the thumb and forefinger of the human hand. It might be the most important image ever recorded, certainly up there with the first imprints of the human hand in prehistoric cave paintings. Bean knew he was on to something truly resonant in the history of our species.
“I could see the Earth above the lunar module,” Bean told me, “and so I put my hand up and I could circle the Earth and put it right in there. So everybody, all 6.4 billion of ‘em, were all down there on that little round rock.”
Like all Apollo astronauts, Alan Bean remained forever moonstruck. “There is never a day,” he said, “sometimes never an hour, that the images of that time aren’t coming to mind.” Back on Earth he reinvented himself as an artist and cornered the market as the world’s only genuine moonscape painter. And why not? The man on the spot was painting scenes no other artist had ever gazed upon. His man-in-the-moonscapes commanded up to $200,000. Given the astronomical prices they fetched, some critics faulted the sameness of them, but they missed the point. He often quoted Buzz Aldrin from Apollo 11 who described “a magnificent desolation”. “That’s exactly what’s there,” Bean explained to me. “There’s nothing there but rocks and dirt and they’re grey and light grey and black and the sky’s black and nothing is moving. And that’s what I painted. It was nothing but you know, somehow it was everything as well.”
The old artist had one cunning marketing trick that added value to his work. On to each canvas he sprinkled a tiny residue of the moon dust that returned to earth on his space suit. I dare say Bean’s otherworldly paintings are more valuable now than they were before his death. For an artist such is life and such is death.
Journalism has taken me to extraordinary places on our beautiful planet. As Bean observed on the Moon, the bleakest are often the most affecting: the wastelands of the polar icecaps, the empty silence of deserts and the loneliness of oceanic wilderness far from the sight of land. It’s a quandary of my trade that after filing the story or screening the film there is always the niggling question: What else might we have done with those experiences? So it was a delight, that day in 2005 in his Houston studio to find Alan Bean was satisfied he had made full use of every kilometre of that 1,000,000km trip to the Moon and back. “OK, I’m an artist now, not near as important in many people’s minds as being an astronaut. But I’ll tell you this, when I paint well, at the end of the day I have the same feeling in my heart, of satisfaction that I had when I walked on the Moon. And I think that’s a nice feeling for humans. You don’t have to be an astronaut to get the best feeling any human can get.”
I suggested to Mr Bean that his perspectives had been clearly sharpened by looking at life from a great distance. He smiled and said, “Well Charlie, I hope that’s true.”
And it is true, Alan Bean was a lovely, modest and thoughtful man and I can’t think of a better representative of homo sapiens to send to another world. He left me with one surprise when I asked him how he would like to be remembered, as one always does with a good eulogy in mind.
“I ate spaghetti on the Moon,” he told me. “Nobody else liked it because it didn’t taste like spaghetti as we know it, but I wanted to be the first human to eat it. Some day when they bury me I want on my tombstone: “The first human to eat spaghetti on the Moon.”
I had forgotten that until I revisited this story. Let’s hope Alan Bean’s family has remembered his epitaph.