You will sometimes hear people argue about the most important events in human history — the discovery of fire, the wheel or the printing press, the first cave paintings, or, in a longer view, the first deliberate cultivation of plants or the rise of cro-magnons and the apparent extinction of the neanderthals.

But, as a friend of mine, paleo artist Bob Walters, pointed out, and on reflection I think I have to agree, if you truly take the long view, you could make a case that there are basically three really important events in the entire three and a half billion year history of life itself on this planet:

– Life begins.

– Life emerges from the sea and establishes itself on land.

– Life leaves the surface of this planet and travels to another celestial body.

Some of us alive today were witness to that third event.

On July 16, 1969, 40 years ago today, three human beings left the surface of the Earth to travel 238,897 miles (384,467 km) to the moon. On July 20th, two of them descended to its surface, and all three then returned to this planet.

Astonishing.

I was in my girlfriend’s den, watching the Apollo 11 mission with her and her younger brother on a small, round cornered television screen in black and white. I knew it was very cool, and pretty important. I didn’t realize how important. I don’t think a lot of people, even those who saw it, realize still just how important it was.

Some may argue that space exploration is a wasteful extravagance and unimportant to day to day life on Earth, and I’m sure those same arguments could be made that life in the primordial oceans was doing just fine without bothering to crawl up on the land, thank you very much, and human beings were fine living in Africa, Europe and Asia without bothering with the American continents.

I’m not so much bringing this up to argue the case (there are plenty of political or even science blogs where that can be argued ad infinitum), but rather to point out how important I personally think this event was, how much I am in awe of it, and how astonished I am that it occurred in my lifetime.

Which brings us, as always on Lines and Colors, to art.

There have been many landscape artists throughout the history of art, whether they were called that or not (see my post on Giovanni Bellini, for example), but we now have a artist who is the only one to paint the landscape of another world from first-hand experience.

Alan Bean was an astronaut on the Apollo 12 mission, launched four months after the landmark Apollo 11 mission, and was the fourth human to step foot on the moon.

Bean retired from NASA in 1981 and devoted himself full time to painting. He had been interested in painting, and taking art classes, since his days as a test pilot, and studied by making copies of paintings by Cezanne and Degas.

While he obviously couldn’t paint “on location” on the moon (en plein vacuum?), he is the only painter who can paint it from the experience of seeing it with his own eyes, and he has done so in an extensive series of paintings.

Some of them are very direct and observational. In others, like most artists, he is interpretive, and beings his own sensibilities to the subject. In particular he follows his desire to bring color to the moon, which seemed to him at the time visually richer than photographs could convey; the latter usually showing grey and black vistas of mountains, craters and dust, broken only by the color of the astronauts themselves and in particular the bright foil skin of the landing module.

In some of Bean’s interpretations, the lunar surface itself is aglow with impressionistic colors. He also uses heavy surface textures in many of his paintings, particularly in images of his fellow astronauts, and often revisits the same theme with varying degrees of color and texture.

His web site contains a series of galleries. Site navigation is horrible, but if you click around long enough you’ll eventually find your way through them. Be sure to click on the image previews, and then on “Large image” to see the textural surface of the paintings.

While Bean may not have made it into the National Gallery of Art, his paintings are on display at another part of the Smithsonian, in the National Air and Space Museum. The show Alan Bean: Painting Apollo, First Artist On Another World opens today and runs to January 13, 2010.

Addendum: there are two new books out with Bean’s artwork: Alan Bean: Painting Apollo and Apollo: An Eyewitness Account By Astronaut/Explorer Artist/Moonwalker Alan Bean.

Having lived in the Philadelphia area for most of my life, I’ve long been acquainted with two of the oldest independent artists’ organizations in the U.S., The Plastic Club and the Philadelphia Sketch Club. I know them both from attending drawing workshops and participating in exhibits at each of the clubs.

The Philadelphia Sketch Club is, as far as I know, the oldest continuing arts club in the country; started in 1860 by students from The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the nation’s oldest art school.

I know those in Europe will look at Americans quizzically when we act as though things from a century and a half ago are “old”; but bear in mind that we are a young country, and age is a matter of perspective.

There are other American arts organizations that trace their origins to the latter part of the 19th Century, the Salmagundi Art Club in New York for example; and many of them have had some of the country’s finest painters and illustrators among their membership.

They often have colorful histories and origins that delineate patterns of dissatisfaction among artists with the artistic establishment of the time, or the desire to practice life drawing from the nude when such practices were frowned upon.

I was delighted to find out recently about another such artists’ organization, which dates as the second oldest in the U.S., The Charcoal Club of Baltimore.

Organized around classes nude figure drawing, and for 20 years the only institution in Baltimore offering life drawing sessions, the club was intended to encourage art appreciation, the sharing of techniques and the promotion of local artists.

The club also became a bastion of civic pride as the sponsor of at least two Salon des Refuses in the 1920’s and 30’s when the Baltimore Museum of Art bypassed Baltimore artists in its juried exhibitions of Maryland artists.

The club, like the other arts clubs I mention, carries on its traditions of promoting life drawing sessions, the sharing of information, techniques and resources among members and the promotion of local artists.

There is a gallery on the club’s site, from which I’ve picked a few member artists whose work struck me and who happen to have web sites displaying more of their work.

(Images above: Lee Alban, David Buckley Good, Rita Curtis)

[Suggestion courtesy of Ray Ridenour]

The rich, vibrant colors; the loose, confident brushstrokes; the painterly surface and broken color, the translucent sparkle of water on the skin of swimming children; the brilliant wash of sunlight defining a billowing sail; the sparkling daubs of suggested wavelets; the dappled corners of a summer garden; the saturated shadows of sun bathed cloth and the physical feeling of light, pouring through his paintings like a mist of illumination, may give you the… um, impression that Spanish painter Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida is an impressionist. He has more in common, though, with painters like his friends John Singer Sargent or William Merritt Chase, and some of the other so-called “American Impressionists”, than with the French “painters of light”.

Yes, Sorolla too is certainly a painter of light; light in all of its dazzling brilliance, light that acts like its own prism, breaking up into sparkling shards of intense color, but with a touch and an intention that is all his own. Veláquez was as much an influence Sargent or Chase, and his early exposure to the work of Jules Bastien-Lepage, and some of the Orientalist painters, along with his extensive classical training and study of the masters, lent his work an underlying classical solidity that the French rebels (with the notable exception of Degas) deliberately obscured with their own kaleidoscopic explosions of color.

Sorolla received attention and honors in Europe. With a dramatic show at the Hispanic Society of New York in 1909, and subsequent shows in New York, he entered a number of collections here in the U.S., including the Getty Museum.

It is at the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, where the young Sorolla spent countless hours studying the work of the masters, and Veláquez in particular, that there is now a major exhibition of Sorolla’s paintings.

Simply called Joaquín Sorolla (1863-1923), the exhibition runs until September 6, 2009. There is a catalogue accompanying the exhibition.

The pages of the exhibition listing include reproductions of some of the pieces in the show, including the images above.

The Prado also has other paintings by Sorolla that you can search for here (hint, click into the zoomable image, then control-click or right-click on the zoomable image and choose “View in another window” to see the entire high-res image).

There are excellent sources for Sorolla’s work online, including Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida – The complete works, and the collection of Museo Sorolla, as well as others I’ll list below.

For more, see my previous post on Joaquín Sorolla. Sorolla was also friends with Aureliano Beruete, another independently minded painter who gets labeled as s “Spanish Impressionist”, and painted his portrait.