From Astronaut to Artist

What do you aspire to after you've become an astronaut and walked on the Moon? Well, if you're Alan L Bean, who was the fourth man to set foot on the Moon, then it's to be a painter and have an exhibition in New York. According to an article in the New York Times

Becoming a painter has been a long slog for Mr. Bean... He has had to give up the hyper-rational way of seeing the world he had learned [and] has trained himself to see things not as they are but as they feel to him, to translate emotions into colors and to resist his scientific urges.

Bean started painting in the early 1960s while still a Navy test pilot, as something to help him relax, then in 1981 he quit NASA to paint full time. He paints slowly, "finishing no more than seven paintings a year" and "longs for a show in New York or another art capital". Well, for most of us that's as ambitious a dream as walking on the Moon, so here's hoping he gets it! Read NYT article...