Earthrise--Mayank Chhaya
Perhaps it is my name, which in Sanskrit means Moon, that I feel an inordinate pull towards Earth’s singular groupie. After binging on South Korean director Choi Hang-Yong’s remarkably compelling Netflix series ‘The Silent Sea’ I feel the pull even stronger.
I have painted the Moon quite a bit but after watching the jaggedly spectacular rendering of the moonscape in ‘The Silent Sea’ my interest in painting it has intensified. From the looks of it the Moon’s surface gives you the feel as if it is powdered glass. It looks so remarkably lifeless.
Th silvery grey of the Moon’s surface lighted up by the Sun’s white light gives it a glow which has inspired humanity for millennia. My personal fascination for the Moon is also from the standpoint of how despite being practically in the same habitable zone or Goldilocks zone as Earth, life has completely skipped the Moon. It is almost as far from the Sun as Earth is.
The most widely accepted theory about the Moon’s origin is that a Mars-sized planet named Theia and proto-Earth crashed into each other a little over 4.5 billion years ago, melted and merged into what is now Earth. But the debris from that crash eventually clumped up into the Moon. Earth and the Moon are very similar in terms of their minerology. There are parts of our planet that could pass of the moonscape. What differentiates the two though is the Moon is geologically dead unlike the very active Earth. That partly explains why life never formed on the Moon.
The Moon’s surface has essentially remained unchanged after its early days. The fact that its atmosphere is so thin as to be non-existent ensures that the Moon’s surface lights up by the Sun in very high resolution. I mention this because ‘The Silent Sea’s lighting of the moonscape is breathtakingly convincing. No other movie or series has been able to create the moonscape so brilliantly perhaps with the exception Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’. That is what is pushing me to paint it more. I will do it just as soon as I am able to afford paint supplies.
For now, have a look at a slice of a painting of Earthrise I had done three years ago from the iconic photograph taken by Apollo 8 astronauts Frank Borman, James A. Lovell, and William A. Anders, the first humans to have left Earth orbit, on December 24, 1968.
