Alan Bean, Moonwalker
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Alan Bean (BS in aerospace engineering, '55) has a unique distinction among University of Texas alumni: He is the only one, to our knowledge, who has his own action figure. This, of course, stems from a far loftier distinction, both figuratively and literally. Even astronauts have business cards, and his reads: "Lunar Module Pilot of Apollo 12. The fourth human to set foot on the moon. Mission Commander of Skylab 3, our first space station. Spent 59 days in orbit 270 miles above the earth. Now an artist, creating paintings that record for future generations mankind's first exploration of another world." Though not quite the cornpone caricature created by Dave Foley, who starred as Bean in HBO's film series From the Earth to the Moon, Bean is without a doubt a native Texan. He speaks loudly and clearly; one can imagine this coming in handy as he tries to communicate with someone a quarter of a million miles away. Born in the Panhandle town of Wheeler, Texas, the son of two Michigan transplants, Bean moved around a lot as a kid, owing to a father who worked for the U.S. Soil Conservation Service, but he spent his junior high and high school years in Fort Worth. His mother was a housewife and owned an ice cream store. He left in 1950 for The University of Texas, where he lived in Prather Hall the whole time and worked as a counselor from his sophomore year on because he got to stay there free. Bean enjoys his lists of historic firsts: He once pedaled on a stationary exercise bike for an entire earth orbit aboard Skylab, making him the first person to "pedal a bicycle around the world." He also claims being the first to eat spaghetti on the moon. And so it goes. The lunar landscapes that fill his studio, which itself has the look of a lunar landing, with its multiple easels mounted on black tripods, stands in stark contrast to the lush tropical greenery that envelopes his condo inside a gated community in--where else?--Houston. Some might see a person who admits to doing little besides painting, and paints virtually nothing but the moon, as a little eccentric, and the self-deprecating Bean would probably concur. But he is not only content with his life; he is vibrantly happy, living morning to night with a historic sense of purpose. "I have to tell these stories!" he'll say, perched on the edge of his seat. And some well-placed people are validating that. For Bean's 1998 coffee table book, Apollo--a mix of paintings and autobiography--actor/producer Tom Hanks wrote: "What one must understand about Al Bean is he is the only artist to have ever walked on the moon. No poet has ever been to the lunar surface, nor any journalist, architect, nor songwriter. In the realm of the arts it has fallen upon Al Bean to be the one moonwalker to turn hard data brought back from the moon into something other than numbered photographs. The images that Al has committed to canvas, then, are important, inspiring, and priceless works of art." 
His paintings, which, in an odd combination, are at once impressionistic and technically detailed, may be priceless, but they definitely are for sale. He has a waiting list of patrons ready to pay five-digits. But for those prices, one not only gets Bean's impressions of what he calls "another world," but also part of that world; he salvaged enough moon dust from the spacesuit patches that had hung on his walls since the '70s for him to mete out a trace amount of dust into each painting. Before the painting begins, he also textures his canvases with the types of tools he used on the moon: a ding with a geologist's pick here, a circular groove from a core sampler there, even a footprint from a space boot. With the recent deaths of Alan Shepard and Pete Conrad, Bean's best friend and mission commander killed two months before this interview in a motorcycle accident, Bean, a young 67, is reminded that the ranks of Apollo-generation astronauts will soon thin even more. And the stories of those missions, if not recorded, will go with them. The life of an artist agrees with him too: "I have the nicest life in the world," he says. Rising at 5 a.m. to exercise, he then paints intermittently all morning, perhaps breaking to do a little business or read a book. After the grueling choice of where to have lunch--"Italian or barbecue?"--he's down for a nap, then back to painting, sometimes until late at night. "Every day I get up and say, 'What do I want to do today?' " In the book, Bean writes in a way that makes the simple wonder of it all new again. Of looking back on the Earth he writes: "It was hard to believe that everybody I had ever known or seen on TV, and the places they lived and played were all on that little blue-and-white marble. It's still hard to believe." Thirty years ago, Alan Bean walked on the moon--an experience so profound it is no wonder he never completely came back. How does moving around like you did affect a little kid? When you're young, you think it's the moving that makes you feel like an outsider or makes you somewhat reserved or shy. However now that I'm older, I see that was my basic personality then as it is now. If I would have been a different person moving around, it would have had a much different effect. You carry yourself with you wherever you go, and there you are. What kind of a kid were you? I was not interested in school. I was very interested in athletics but wasn't very good at athletics and wasn't a high achiever at all. I was more of a frustrated youngster, wanting to be an athlete, never really wanting to be smart. It just wasn't a thought that came into my head. I wanted to have a lot of friends, and never really had that. What sport did you aspire to? Football or baseball, whatever was in season. But I didn't have the self-confidence to go out for the team and be coached. I wasn't coachable in those days, because if the coach had said to me, "You need to do something different," I would have taken it in such a bad way that I would have quit the team. I would have thought that he was mad at me instead of trying to help me out. So your personality is along with you for the ride. What was the turning point? I think the turning point was just growing up and being in an environment at The University of Texas where people don't truly worry about you that much. I found out there that if I didn't study, I made poor to medium grades, but if I studied, I could make good grades. I didn't know this as a kid. I went through life up until then believing that you were born a certain way--My mother believed this for sure--and that whatever you did didn't change your station much. At The University of Texas I found out that wasn't true, that if you put out effort you could change your results very quickly. When this dawned on me, I said, "I don't want to be this person I've been all along." When I did begin to put out effort I did really well. That was a big eye-opener. Then I began to put out more effort and do more, and maybe that's the story of my life, because now I realize that you can do what you want. I've competed all my life. In the Navy and at NASA, I've competed with people from the Naval Academy, the Military Academy, MIT, UCLA, you name it. When I was competing with them for good grades or positions on a flight or anything else, I never felt like my education at The University of Texas held me back in any way relative to anybody else. I always felt like there were smarter people than me there. But I always felt like UT gave me as good an education as I could get. If I had gone to Harvard or MIT I wouldn't have been a bit different than I am today. I feel like everyone who goes to The University of Texas is blessed and lucky to be there because they're getting a chance to be as good as they can be. You entered UT as an engineering major, so you were in the ballpark. I had always wanted to be a pilot when I was a kid. Then as I got a little older I wanted to be a Navy pilot because I thought they were better because they landed on carriers. (I've since found out that they're the same; it depends on the person.) So in high school I joined the Naval Air Reserve and on the weekends and in the summer I was around the airplanes at Navy Dallas. I loved all that. Then I got an NROTC scholarship to UT and that's how I ended up there because we really couldn't afford it otherwise. I don't think I ever took a book home in high school. I didn't care about it. Maybe it's like I am now: focused on what I'm doing and the rest of the world can do what it wants. And so we had been talking about taking the NROTC exam because I thought it would be wonderful to go to a college and be a Naval officer, then fly. And so the morning came to take it and I woke up and said, "Well, I'll never pass it anyway. My grades are bad. They'll never pick me." So I went back to sleep. My mother came in and said, "I thought you were supposed to get up and take the NROTC exam." I told her just what I told you, and she said, "If you'll get up, I'll drive you downtown." And she never did anything like that. She was a believer that you've got to do on your own. Very surprising. So I got up and took the test, and did well because I knew all the airplane stuff. So they sent me to The University of Texas. Otherwise I would have probably gone to TCU and lived at home and been the same kid I always was forever. One of those moments in life when it could go either way? My mother was the one who came and woke me up. She had more confidence in me than I did. My theory is that we're all trapped being who we are. And we do a lot of things to change it, but we can't. We can change it momentarily, maybe for a year or two, but after a while we drift back to the person we are. And that's not bad if we can find the person we are and get a successful life out of that. It turned out for me that flying airplanes was naturally fun. One of the biggest surprises when I got into flight training was seeing all these people that wanted to be pilots. I didn't know anybody in high school that wanted to be a pilot, or even be in the military; they made fun of that. And I always wanted to be. Then when I got to a squadron on a day-to-day basis I was surrounded by people that wanted to fly better, to strafe better, land on carriers. I soon found that I could do all that well, because I was working hard at it. I was always the turtle of the group. I wasn't a fast learner. I learned that as an astronaut. When we'd take a course, after the first day or week, I wouldn't be one of the smartest ones; I'd be in the bottom 25 percent as far as what I knew about the course. But I was one of the few that would go re-read the material and then read it through the years. And if they gave me one of those tests today, I probably would be one of the top scorers. One of the great things about the universe is that it's fair. We can't choose our parents. So you've got a certain I.Q. This other guy's got a higher I.Q. That's unfair in a way. He's prettier than you are. He's got rich parents. You can't control any of that. But you can decide to stay focused. If he does that, he'll beat you because of the higher I.Q. Somehow, that seems so fair to me. There are a lot of unfair things about the universe: good guys that fly better than you get killed because their engine quits. That's unfair. But other parts of it are fair. So discipline is the great equalizer? No. It's discipline and understanding what you want to do, then focusing on it, then doing it, and not getting distracted. Most people I meet are doing eight things: They're writing a book; not only that but going to night school about a different subject; they're worried about the clothes they're wearing; they just talked to somebody yesterday about financing their car. They've got all these things going on. They're going to have a tough time. Some people can do that. Pete Conrad, my best friend and my mentor, could do that. We could be talking about space, and he'd get a phone call about something like the transmission on his race car. "We've got to get the transmission changed because the gear ratio's not working on this track." Suddenly, all his effort would be on that. The next day, someone would call about motorcycle racing. He could do all of them well. But I never could do that. Somebody would call me about racing cars, and I'd be saying "sounds like a lot of fun," but in my head I'd be thinking about space stuff or, in this case, painting. I get lots of offers to do lots of things now. I don't do them. I wish I could do all those things, but I can't. I found I have to stay painting. That's what I think about all the time. I know what's going on in the world, but I don't worry about it. When was the first time you thought about a career in the space program? While I had been a Navy pilot I saw other airplanes that were flying off ships that we were on. I wanted to fly them all, and I found out that if you became a test pilot you could fly them all. So I applied to become a test pilot. Then along comes the space program. I start watching John Glenn or Al Shepard on TV. I thought I had the best job in the world. But when I watched them flying, I said, "Well, today I flew 750 miles per hour, but that guy, John Glenn, is flying 18,000 miles per hour. I was up 15 to 20 miles, and he was up 125 miles." So I thought maybe he had the best job in the world. How do I get to be that? When I looked into it, they were all test pilots. Glenn was in the Marines, Shepard was in the Navy, all of them came from the military. So here I was already in the pipeline. After I'd been there a couple of years they put out the request for new astronauts. I applied for that. The Navy said, maybe he can do this. It was a surprise and nice. So they sent me down to NASA, and I got to be one of 32 finalists. And I go back home and get a call from Deke Slayton, the head astronaut, that they decided not to take me. That's when they took Pete Conrad, Jim Lovell, John Young, Neal Armstrong, and some of the others. So I had a choice to make: try to get more qualified in case they ever gave me an opportunity again, or just go do something else. I began to do a lot of studying and tried to do things in my career that would prepare me if they ever gave me another chance. About a year and a half later, they did it again, and this time they took me. How many years was it from when you entered the space program to when you found out you'd be on Apollo 12? I came in in October of '63. The way it worked is you were on a backup crew and three flights later you were on the prime and three flights later you were on the backup. I was working over in Skylab, and it was kind of never-neverland. "Let's put Bean over there and keep him out of the way." I wasn't very good, still not, at certain things. I'm good at flying. So I ended up being the last person in my group to fly. And maybe I wouldn't have even flown then except that C.C. Williams, who was flying with Pete Conrad and Dick Gordon, got killed. Pete, who was one of my instructors in test pilot school, asked Deke if he could have me, and Deke said yes. And so I suddenly pop up on the crew. As soon as I was backing up Apollo 9, we knew we would be three flights later. But still we didn't know how all this was going to work. When we started 9, Apollo 1 hadn't even had the fire. A lot of things were changing. When we knew we were going to get 12, we knew then that we'd be training to do what 11 did, and so would 13. Because you can't just take one shot. We had to get to the moon by the end of the decade per President Kennedy's dictates. So we had three flights to get it. In July 1969, Apollo 11 was going to try. We thought they'd make it but if they didn't, then we'd try in September and if we didn't, 13 would try in November. Apollo 11 made it, so they slid us back four months because they wanted us to do pinpoint landing. Everyday it's fun going to work. It's hard not to be excited when you're going to find a way to land on the moon. It's like an impossible dream, even to the people doing it. I'm sure the person who built the Tower at The University of Texas, he had it on his blueprints, and they're up there building it and he's thinking, "I wonder how much wind this will stand. It's supposed to stand 100 miles per hour," or some number. But you never really know about things. You find that out as a test pilot. That's why they exist. We knew it was going to be difficult to get to the moon. We didn't know how difficult. Of course we lost the Apollo 1 crew and that was a big surprise. We had three extra sets of crews. We thought we'd lose something like that along the way. We lost them; that was one. Then we would have lost the Apollo 13 crew except they had a failure just at the right spot; if it had been much earlier or much later by half a day, they wouldn't have been back. What does that do to you to be in such a high-risk situation? You know going in that you're sitting up there on top of this bomb, basically. How do you get up every morning with that knowledge? That's why you go to test pilots. You go to people who like that sort of thing and are good at it. When they were building a rocket and it flew like an airplane, then they wanted to find the people that, for some reason, can do this job. They like it. They have an attitude that's good. If you read The Right Stuff, it's mostly just an attitude. Some of them are good at it and some of them aren't and it's not necessarily the fact that your I.Q. is huge, or maybe it's a handy thing to have it even less. When kids ask me about college, I always say you've got to look at what you're doing for fun. Look at what you're doing on the weekend. What are you doing? "Well, last weekend I did this." "That doesn't seem to have anything to do with business. What did you do before?" "Well, I worked in this political campaign." "You did? What did you do that for?" "I thought it would be fun." "Well, why don't you take a course that would put you in a position to do something in politics?" When I became an artist, that is what my hobby was. A friend of mine from UT, Pat Brill, and I we were out having dinner one night when I'd come back from Skylab, and she said to me, "What are you going to do when you leave NASA and you quit being an astronaut?" I said, "Well, I'm not planning on doing that any time soon, but I'll probably go to work for Rockwell or McDonnel-Douglas or something like that." And she said, "Well you ought to be an artist." I said, "You're crazy." I hadn't painted any space paintings, only other traditional kinds of paintings. She said, "No, I think you could make a living being an artist." I had never thought of that as a profession, even though it was my hobby. After she said that, then I couldn't get it out of my mind. I began to say things like, "You know, it's true. I paint on the weekend. I don't go designing airplanes on the weekend. Maybe I would really like being an artist." So I took some time off and did it full-time to see if I'd like it. I simulated it, which is always good. (I learned that at NASA.) I simulated being an artist, and the more I simulated being an artist the more I realized it's much more difficult than I'd thought. But at the same time I liked it. I cared about it! I had a lot of nice job offers for a lot of money, but I didn't care about them. I care about these paintings. I care about them every day. I care about this one I'm working on right now being just right. I changed the colors from a little more blue to a little more green, which doesn't sound like it's very important to other people. It isn't. In the grand scheme of things, whether I painted the shadows of that suit sort of blue or blue-green, or sort of a warm yellow-green, is not important. But to me, it's important. [Gets up and walks to easel.] Making these little fittings here right [points to front of space suit]--I spent about two-and-a-half days making these fittings right. You can see the little centerlines, the axis of the ellipsis, to get these locks, the connectors, make this little ball that pulls a pin out and lets you unlock this to let air out of your suit. Well, first of all, I'm the only one around here that knows what these fittings look like or gives a damn. You said, in the grand scheme of things it doesn't matter, but each one of us has a grand scheme inside ourselves, don't we? We do. We're trapped being who we are. And a lot of our life should be spent, particularly early on, trying to figure out what that is. Everybody knows "To thine own self be true." What the hell does that mean? It doesn't help you pick a major. It doesn't help you pick a job. When you switched careers to do this, did you catch flak from the boys back at the office? About half of them thought I was having a mid-life crisis. Those were the ones, mostly, that didn't see art as a worthy profession. You know, a lot of people feel that way. Other people thought it was a worthy profession, and they thought it was a good idea just to try it out. I don't think anybody imagined what would eventually evolve. And now they all like it. They all think it's wonderful because I'm preserving something that's very important to me and to them. One of the things astronauts never did much is come up to somebody and say, "Gee, I'm proud of you." They might say "Good flight," or, "I like what you did on that rendezvous." That was about the most that would ever be said. But I had so many people back in the transition time say things like, "I'm really proud you did this, Alan. I really love your work." The first time a couple of them said it to me I couldn't believe it. Are they kidding me or something? Do they think I'm screwed up and need it? (Laughs) It's been nice since. But you have to be able to go out on your own--do what you think is right and not listen. I'd learned my lesson by then. You've got to find your dream and go for it. And if it doesn't work out, maybe a new dream will pop up and then you go for that one. Do you paint exclusively space-themed pieces? Monet's my favorite artist, so I did that one. [Points to huge Monet-esque painting of lilies that hangs above living room couch.] But I'm the only one who can paint the moon, because I'm the only one who knows whether that's right or not. Period. Of course, I'm the only one who cares. It's not like everybody's wanting to do it and I'm the only one who can. It's more like, I've just been accidentally given a whole planet. "Here, Bean! As long as you've been to the moon and you're an artist, why don't you paint this place [points to moon painting], and every other artist you've ever heard of, they've got to paint this place [points down to earth]. So you could paint this place if you want, but it would be kind of dumb because you've got this other place." 
As the centuries unfold, millions of artists will live on the moon and paint the moon and Mars as we go out into the universe. My dream is to do this well enough so that it tells the story of humankind's exploration of another world. I hope people will care enough about these so that they stay around and they represent the first art of another place besides the earth by someone who was there. We'll all be long gone by then, but this will be around. It won't be like the cave drawings in France, but it will be: "Let's see what that old guy did back just before the turn of the 21st century. Yeah, that's not too bad." There are other artists who paint space from photos. What is it about the experience of having been there that sets your work apart? First of all, I know what it was like. I can paint it and say, "That looked like that" or not. Also I spent 18 years learning this hardware. When I was on the Development Board at UT, we'd have meetings in the Littlefield Home. And I'd always admired this painting that was on the staircase of this brown horse. One day I said to a fellow member, who was a rancher from West Texas, "I've always liked that painting." He said to me, "The horse is too long." And I looked at that painting and sure enough, I'd never seen that. That's the difference. When you've spent 18 years messing with this stuff, you know what it looks like. I know all these people in space suits. Nobody knows them but me. That's Gene Cernan in his suit, and it's not like Alan Bean in his suit, and it's definitely not like Pete in his suit. You begin to know. Most space artists are doing shuttles and such, and those are painting for Rockwell or Martin to show their latest modules. There are very few people who can make a living painting the space age. What was going through your head when you were sitting on the launch pad? Was your heart pounding out of your chest? No, I was pretty even, because we practiced over and over again. But it sped up as the launch approached, because you need to have your adrenaline flowing. You need to be somewhat excited to do the best you can do. So you learn to get in that state as a pilot. Did you all get off on the first try? Yes. Every Apollo did. In fact if you didn't get off pretty much on time, you had to wait a whole month because everything was keyed to the lighting at your landing site. You had to land when light level was less than your descent angle, which was about 10 degrees. You only had a few hours you could go. Apollo 17 did go about two hours after it was planned, but it made up the time. What was your emotional state as you started back? Just glad we'd done it and a little bit disappointed in the fact that it didn't last very long. You train so hard for years and then after less than two days, you've done it. So there was a kind of a letdown for me. A feeling like: We need to do more than that! But you can't go the next day. It's not like flying airplanes where you go out later in the day. That was it. I didn't fly again until 1973 when I flew on Skylab for 59 days. So do you still have the Corvette? No. We (astronauts) were treated like executives of General Motors. They loaned us two cars a year, any two cars we wanted. So we'd get a family car and a Corvette. We'd put in the gas and oil; they'd do all the rest. And then at the end of the year they'd phone you up and say, "What two cars do you want this year?" So we had red Corvettes and black ones and convertibles and T-tops. That went on from '63 to maybe '71. There's a fellow in Austin, I believe, who owns my old car (the gold one). And he's got it fixed up better than when I drove it. There's a Corvette museum in Georgia where they make them and I've heard that they want to get all three of them and put them in their museum. That would really be wonderful. Were you three the cut-ups they portrayed you as in From the Earth to the Moon? 
Pete set the tone. One of the great lessons in my life was being on his crew. We had a really good relationship. We were the crew that got along the best, and after it was all over we still were friends. Even the week before Pete was killed, Dick Gordon and I were out there (in California) doing an autograph show with Pete, and we spent four days together. After we had done the autograph show for a couple of days, the three of us just reminisced. We got along great all the time and never did fight. Neal, Buzz, and Mike aren't at all alike. They never phone each other and say, "What are you doing?" They were a great crew, but they're three different kinds of people. Do you still keep in contact with NASA? Sometimes they'll ask me to give a briefing or talk to the new astronaut candidates. You're always doing development at NASA because you're charged with being ready to do these things. And so they interviewed us for several hours about how we thought a suit should look on Mars. They really knew more about it than we did, but maybe we said one or two things that might be helpful. I'm happy to do anything they'd ask. That's about it. They don't ask that much. They've got their own team and they're cruising along. What's your perception of the agency these days? Does it still have the same values that it did when you were active there? I think it has the very same values. I'm out there doing something every three months or so. I see the same glint in the eyes of the flight controllers or the engineers and particularly the astronauts. When I look out in the audience, they look awfully young to me now, and I know I looked old to them. I just think how smart they look and how tense they are and how all of those people want to do good things for the country. One of the blessings that I had in my career was always being in a job where you were trying to do your best for a good reason. You were always trying to be a great naval aviator because you wanted to be able to go to war if you needed to and help the country. I was doing it mostly because I just liked doing those things. But we were doing them for the right reasons. And it's the same way now. People are always thinking of what they can do with the shuttle that would be more beneficial to people on earth. How can we modify it--spend this money so it gives us more capability for the future?--which means more capability for the United States in the future. They don't waste money there, believe me. We never covered up anything. People come to me and ask, "What do you think about UFOs? I bet you know a lot about them." I say, "I know the government isn't covering them up!" We were trying to find these other people. We wouldn't go out in space and hunt for people if there were people here. And I know they never tell you what to say. There's no secret anything. There's no "We're flying secret missions today and we're not telling you what we're doing." If that's true, it's defense-related and not NASA-related and not UFO kinds of things. People say, "NASA would have told you not to say you saw a UFO." I say, "That's not true. They would not say that. If I came back and said I saw a UFO they'd write it down and they'd want to prove that it was or wasn't." We want to find UFOs if we can! That's the business we're in. I usually ask them, "Why would we tell people to cover it up?" They say, "People would panic if they knew there were aliens." I say, "Would you panic?" "No." I say, "I've never met a person that would." Not only that, but if you were a reporter and you could break the greatest story ever, namely that we've got some extraterrestrials over there in that hangar, you'd be famous forever. You'd win the Pulitzer Prize. Would you be quiet? We played it straight. We always played it straight. When John Glenn went up last year, did that start any wheels turning in your head, like, I could do this again if they asked me? A lot of astronauts feel that way. I could have stayed and flown. I was physically fit; still am. But I had this job to do. After my two flights, I was training to fly the shuttle. I said, "You know, they've got people who can fly the space shuttle as good or better than I can here. They'll never miss me. However, if I don't do this job [paint ], then these stories are going to be lost forever." Maybe nobody cares but me, but I am going to go do that job. I'm 67. When I think about living, I always relate it to getting this job done. I don't say, "Gee, I hope I live 10 more years because I'd like to live 10 more years." I never say that. I'm always saying, "Boy, I hope I can live 10 more years at least because I need to do another hundred paintings so that I can get this job done. I've always felt like I need to leave something over 200. And so I feel I'm working against a kind of deadline. I've got to stay healthy, I've got to keep my weight down, I've got to eat right. I have people approach me and say, "I'll pay you just as much to go do these other things." I say, "I can't do that. I don't have enough life left. I've got to get this job done." So what are your parameters? Just the Apollo? When I left I was going to do everything. Then I began to see how difficult it was to learn all these things that need to be done. So I focused on Apollo. Two hundred years from now they will have forgotten Skylab and the shuttle and Mercury and Gemini, but Apollo they'll remember. You remember people that went somewhere, whether it was around the world, like Magellan, or whether it was the first person to land in the Western world. That's the way it's going to be then. They'll remember John Glenn. They'll remember Neal and Buzz because they walked on the moon. Probably forget Mike, except in the encyclopedia. They'll forget all the rest of us. I think they'll remember the astronaut that goes up in charge of the first space station. Not the space station Freedom, unless it's the space station that grows into a village, sort of like Jamestown. They'll remember the equivalent astronaut to John Smith. They'll remember that because of that story but not all these other things equally important any more than we remember all these other things that happened in history equally important to Columbus. These [paintings] are historical documents. I hope they'll tell stories that we wish we knew about other adventures. We wish an artist had been along with Columbus. Maybe Columbus tripped and fell out of the boat. It'd be fun to have a picture! Have a painting of him walking up and greeting the natives, and what they looked like, really, and what the other ship captains looked like. How about Lewis and Clark? Meriwether Lewis was a great artist, but he did birds and things. He didn't do paintings of what they did and how they met Sacajawea. Another one that I think about is Jesus. I'm not a religious person, but I think he made a big mistake. He got too many fishermen. He should have gotten 11 good fishermen and one good sketch artist. And then we could see what he looked like. . . . I've got a list over there of 18 paintings in priority order of the best stories I know, and I'm going to tell them in order. When Al Shepard died, I said, "Wow, I better start thinking a little more clearly." I was doing a lot of things with flags and stuff. Now when people call me for a commission I say, "I will do the painting that I'm doing next for you. I'll do it the size you want, but if you don't want it, then I'll sell it to the next person. When I start another one, I'll call you." By Avrel Seale,
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