Drifting Away

Drifting Away is an original pastel painting on paper. It is 8.5 x 12 inches. It is shown mounted in a 18 x 24 inch poster frame with two mats: black & white paper. Drifting Away, by Jake Beckman, is homage to our celestial cousin, the moon, which is in fact slowly drifting away. The sea tides created by the forces between the earth and the moon are the reason it is slowly leaving us. It is hard to imagine the day when our companion in the lonely reaches of space is but another pinprick of light there. The colors are shades of the sky and sea: blue, blue-green and white, the black of space and the warm tones of sunset. The Work is signed by the Artist, "Jake," in the lower right hand corner. On the back of the work the title and date of creation are noted in pencil; the FAR Tag No. 2704 is placed in the region behind the signature on the back of the work. The work is federally copyrighted. All reproduction and publishing copyrights are retained by the artist. Images are not to be copied, re-distributed, imitated, derived OR otherwise used in any form without the explicit written permission of the artist.

I come from a physics background. The beauty of the numbers interests me as does the mechanics of space. At one point in the past, the moon rotated presenting different faces to the earth and loomed even larger in our sky. As it orbits the earth and interacts with it over time, frictional forces have stopped it from rotating about its own center so now it only presents us with one face, the man in the moon and it is slowly pulling away. In my mind I romantically imagine it when it was much closer to us than it is now. What a magnificent thing it would have been to see. -Jake