One small step for a portrait…
Already in 2005 as I began to gather subjects for my own special kind of Apple Pie, I had it in mind to find a Russian-American subject to play Neil Armstrong. The first man on the moon had to make an appearance in the series, and it followed naturally that someone with Russian origins should fill that role since the US would never have made it to the moon in the 1960s without the fierce competition of the USSR.
Of course, wanting a Russian-American participant and having one are two different things. I’d sent out queries to all the Russian-American associations and businesses in town: no one was biting. I was at the stage in my subject-search that I like to call “ask every last person you meet.” In my experience, this method of finding a participant is never successful until I become tired of asking strangers strange questions. That’s when the subject usually falls in my lap…!
And that’s how it worked with Alex, my Cosmonaut Neil Armstrong.
Marc Chagall’s I And The Village 1911
I decided to bring elements of Marc Chagall’s work into my portrait of Alex as Armstrong because, like the subject, the artist was a Russian Jew who lived much of his life outside of Russia. And too, there is a distinct lack of gravity in Chagall’s work—startling when you consider that the man was painting pre- Space Race. In these compositional sketches, I hadn’t yet decided to focus on Chagall’s I And The Village specifically. I was toying with many different ways of presenting the same visual information.
In doing further research on Chagall and his oeuvre, I discovered what a good match he was for my painting. His name, a Jewish one, sounds like the Russian word for “he/you/I walked in a striding step.” Chagall often represented this action as a figure taking a step on an upward diagonal. He would also sign his name in Hebrew script but right-to-left (as Russian is written) near the figure.* What better reference for a painting that is, in part, about a singular man and his enormously important moment? One small—but striding!—step for a man.
The American flag on the moon has always struck me as a peculiarly undignified and childish gesture. I decided to put a footprint on the flag on my moon because it always seemed to me like that was more the point of the leaving the planet: humanity instead of nationality.
Getting started. Early on the footprint on the flag was a booted one, like those in the pictures of moon dust. I also had the headset all wrong and I wouldn’t solve this problem until much later on in the process.
Establishing colors.
Layering.
Here, I moved the flag and added an element while also finally adjusting the headset to fit on Alex’s head.
When I was a kid, my father bought my mother a Fisher Pen. This writing utensil was specially designed to work without gravity, useful for writing on the ceiling or on the moon and, as it turns out, for saving the whole moon mission.
The Fisher Pen Company spent millions of dollars developing the pen, only to discover that the Russians had done the old “work around.” They were using pencils to write in zero-gravity! Practical thinking, but Armstrong wouldn’t have returned to tell his tale without the Zero Gravity Pen. The story goes that, exiting the lunar landing module, either Armstrong or Buzz Aldrin brushed the ignition switch with his bulky space suit, breaking off the toggle. In order to keep the lunar module’s weight down, the mission was without tools for even such minor repairs. They did, however, have one very expensive pen for logging incidents. On Houston’s orders, they jammed the Fisher Pen into the ignition and used it as a toggle to flip the switch. The pen was mightier than the pencil! The official NASA history likes to point out that the Russians subsequently bought a hundred Zero Gravity Pens for use in its space missions.
This pen’s story had to be included in the painting and it was here that I figured out where: I added a patch to the shoulder of my Cosmonaut’s suit.
Gwenn Seemel
I And Cosmonaut Neil Armstrong (Russian-American)
2008
acrylic on canvas
42 x 42 inches
detail image of I And Cosmonaut Neil Armstrong
detail image of I And Cosmonaut Neil Armstrong
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*For more information about Marc Chagall and his oeuvre, see Benjamin Harshaw’s Marc Chagall And The Lost Jewish World from 2006.
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Gwenn...
20 July 2009: It’s been 40 years already…40 years!!! Why haven’t we been back?
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