Moon and Cow

Hey diddle, diddle

The cat and fiddle

The cow jumped over the moon.

The little dog laughed 

To see such sport.

And the dish ran away with the spoon.

(The Cow Jumped over the Moon)

Moon and Cow, with the moonlit night and the resting cow, evokes a feeling of peacefulness.  I think of the nursery rhyme, The Cow Jumped Over the Moon.  I think of the steady rhythm of the poem and the innocence of a young child.

On the other hand, in 1963, when Alex Colville completed the painting, the world was in the throes of the Cold War.  Children hovered under their desks during atomic bomb drills.  The hands of the superpower leaders hovered over the nuclear "button".  Mercifully, President John F. Kennedy had recently averted disaster with the diplomacy he displayed during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Only two years before however, President Kennedy had promised to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade.  And while the world sat on the precipice of World War III, which would have put us back into the stone age, the two superpowers were working feverishly behind the scenes to forge ahead and put a man on the moon.  The Space Race refocussed their attention.  It would be only six years later that 600 million spectators would watch in hushed silence as Neil Armstrong placed his boot on the moon's dusty surface and declared:  "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

http://www.duluthaviationinstitute.org/apollo_11_flag.jpg

John F. Kennedy's The Decision to Go to the Moon

Millions of Americans craned their necks to see the Soviet satellite Sputnik race across the ink black sky in October of 1957, marking the start of the space race.  Many more heard about the first Russian's space flight in April of 1961.  Premier Krushchev, with the accomplishment, boasted that socialism had conquered democracy.  However, on May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy delivered a speech announcing that the United States would put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, a feat that seemed next to impossible at the time.  On July 20, 1969, with Neil Armstrong's words "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind," Kennedy's promise came true.

Here is an excerpt from Kennedy's historic speech:

But why some say the moon?  Why choose this as a goal?  And they may ask why climb the highest mountain?  Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic?  Why does Rice play Texas?  We choose to go to the moon.  We choose to go to the moon in this decade and to do other things, not because they are easy but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

http://www.artofmanliness.com/2008/08/01/the-35-greatest-speeches-in-history/