The summer of 2019 marked the 50th anniversary of the first person to walk on the moon. Most of us who were alive that July day in 1969 remember where we were and who we were with as we watched that amazing event unfold on TV.
I was at my cousins’ house at a neighboring Nashville suburb; we had been swimming in their backyard pool, and we stopped to gather around their television to watch in awe as Neil Armstrong stepped into history. That was also the summer before my senior year in high school. I had wanted to go to Woodstock that summer, but my parents looked at me like I was crazy when I suggested it. They then broke out in prolonged laughter, thinking I was punking them with my request. Consequently, I opted to travel to Pittsburgh with a youth group from my church to help set up a Vacation Bible School in nearby Beaver Falls. Between a lunar walk, a 500,000-person rock festival and a Pennsylvania VBS, it was quite a summer.
A few years later, as a college art major (with an emphasis in watercolor painting, mind you) I was trying to decide what my next painting would be when I stumbled onto a stash of my dad’s National Geographic magazines. One issue featured a pictorial account of the lunar walk; another included pictures from a rodeo. There was cattle roping, bronco riding, gunfight re-enactments and a genuine Wells Fargo stagecoach. I gathered up the NatGeo issues and brought them back to school with me to use as reference pictures for my paintings. One afternoon as they lay scattered on the floor of my little college art studio, I noticed that the rodeo issue with its stagecoach centerspread had somehow landed on top of the moonwalk cover. Even back then, I loved strange and unexpected juxtapositions and it looked like it would be fun to paint as a watercolor. However, when I presented the finished piece to my art professor, he studied it carefully with a squint and a grimace.
“I’d love to give you an ‘A’,” he said, “but there is no oxygen on the moon—those horses would never survive, much less be able to pull a stagecoach without air to breathe.”
“Uh…actually, the ‘horses’ are robots,” I said, thinking off the top of my head.
“Oh,” he said, reluctantly, “In that case, great job.”
Okay. So now, it’s more than four decades later, and all my tubes of watercolors have long since dried up, and I’ve traded pigments for pixels. Once I saw that we were coming up on the 50th Anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s historic walk, I thought it would be fun to “re-enact” my watercolor painting from all those years ago—only this time, I’d paint it on my Mac. Then, I thought that if I added watermelons, it would be perfect for the cover of the Summer 2019 issue of SouthernReader (https://southernreader.com/SouthRead22.1.html). We’ve used a watermelon as a major or minor element in every cover of SouthernReader since the inaugural issue back in the Summer of 2001 (an online space odyssey).
I started the illustration in Adobe Illustrator and exported it (in layers) to Photoshop. It’s a paradox in that it’s both different and similar to the original painting. However, I can almost hear my old college art professor saying with a scowl, “How can those astronauts possibly eat their slices of watermelon? They’re wearing helmets!”
Uh…actually, the “watermelons” are holograms.
David Ray Skinner 