Is Anyone Out There?
Artwork Description
Since we first walked erect, it has been a conviction of mankind that in some fashion, someone, something, has inhabited the heavens. The Space Race itself was as political as it was strategic, yet at its soul, what captured the hearts and minds of the world at large was the possibility of coming one step closer to answering the question stirring within us all for millennia “Is anyone out there?”
40 years ago, on November, 14, 1969, Lunar Module Pilot Alan Bean, with fellow Apollo 12 astronauts, Commander Charles “Pete” Conrad and Command Module Pilot Richard Gordon, left Earth for the Moon. Five days later on Nov. 19, Bean stepped off the lunar module Intrepid and onto the Moon’s Ocean of Storms and became the fourth human to walk on another planet. Yet for all the training, for all the data, for all the simulations and discipline, one of the simplest and most human of questions came to his mind, “Is anyone out there?”
We did send an artist to the Moon and it is no small matter of pride that we are able to call him a member of The Greenwich Workshop Family of Artists. Alan Bean paints the Apollo missions from a perspective no other can: as one who has been there. His paintings were on display in a one-man exhibition at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. “Is Anyone Out There?” was a center piece of the exhibit and perhaps its most commented upon painting. We selected it to commemorate the 40th Anniversary of Alan Bean’s lunar flight because it epitomizes that simple thought that took man to the Moon, “Is there anybody out there?”
At 40” x 30”, the commemorative MasterWork™ Fine Art Giclee Canvas is the largest reproduction we have offered of Alan Bean’s artwork. It is set at an edition of 69 to commemorate the year he set foot on the Moon. A Fine Art Paper Giclée edition is set at 244 pieces, the duration, in hours, of the Apollo 12 mission from lift-off to landing. Both editions are personally signed by astronaut, moonwalker and the first artist on another world, Captain Alan Bean.
Too often, the opportunity to possess a piece of history passes us by. Going to the Moon will stand as one of mankind’s greatest accomplishments: that first giant step into the heavens. Twelve men have gazed back the quarter-million miles to the Earth from the surface of Moon. And only Alan Bean, through his paintings of the Apollo program, can place us there beside him.
Also available:
- Limited Edition – Giclée Paper – 22 x 16.5
