HOUSTON — It has been nearly 40 years since Alan L. Bean walked on the moon as an Apollo astronaut, but he still wrestles with the experience every day, trying to recapture what he and other astronauts saw and felt in the medium of paint.

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Michael Stravato for The New York Times

Mr. Bean uses a mold of his original moon boot and the hammer he took into space to lend texture to his paintings. More Photos »

Becoming a painter has been a long slog for Mr. Bean, who describes himself as a slow learner. He has had to give up the hyper-rational way of seeing the world he had learned as a Navy test pilot and engineer. He has trained himself to see things not as they are but as they feel to him, to translate emotions into colors and to resist his scientific urges.

“When I left NASA, I made up my mind I was not going to be an astronaut who painted, but an artist who used to be an astronaut,” he said. “It takes a while to change the heart.”

Critical attention has eluded Mr. Bean, 77, though he has developed, largely through word of mouth, a following among private collectors who pay up to $175,000 for one of his works. In July, the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington will mount a show of 45 of his works and will release a book of reproductions of his paintings. He has high hopes that the 40th anniversary of the moon landing may lure critics to take a look at his work.

Most of the 12 astronauts who have trod the moon’s surface later worked in the aerospace industry, trading on their experience at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

But Mr. Bean always stuck out among the other fighter-pilots-turned-spacemen of his era. The Apollo astronauts were known for hobbies like hunting, sports cars, golf and skiing. Mr. Bean was studying art, painting still lifes to unwind between missions.

He picked up painting in 1962 while he was a Navy test pilot. On a whim, he took a watercolor course at night at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, near where he was stationed. “I wasn’t that good,” he said. “But I liked it.”

It was not until the late 1970s — long after visiting the Moon on Apollo 12 — that he realized he had no great feelings about flowers and fruit as a subject.

“My astronaut friends began to say to me, ‘Bean, why do you keep painting the earth?’ ” he recalled. “ ‘You’re the only artist that’s ever been anywhere else but this earth, and you keep painting the earth.’ ”

“One weekend I didn’t have any flowers to paint, and I said I think I will paint this photo of Pete Conrad on the Moon,” he recalled. “So I just started painting it and after about two hours, I said, you know, I care about all this stuff. I love spacesuits. I like the lunar modules. And I didn’t really like plants that much.”

So he started to paint missions to the Moon, drawing from photographs, videotapes, the stories of other astronauts and his own experience in November 1969, when he and Mr. Conrad spent seven hours and 45 minutes on the Moon’s surface.

Then, in 1981, after 18 years as an astronaut, Mr. Bean resigned to take up painting full time. The decision took some at NASA by surprise. After all, he was a rock star at the space agency, having logged 1,671 hours in space and commanded a Skylab mission. But there were younger pilots who could handle the new space shuttle, he said, and only he could do the paintings he wanted to do.

In the 1980s, he realized he did not want to paint the Moon strictly as it appeared — a monochromatic landscape of gray, black and white, with the earth rising like a blue and white marble. He allowed colors unthinkable on the Moon to creep into his work.

“People talk about nature being beautiful, and it is, but it’s not harmonized like a painting,” he said. “If Monet painted what he saw, we wouldn’t celebrate him today. He painted a little of what he saw but then he painted mostly the way he felt about it.”

Yet Mr. Bean’s methods still reflect his scientific side. He builds a scale model of every scene he paints, and uses a klieg light to simulate the sun and to get the shadows right. He works out the angle of the light and the positions of the people with mathematical precision. He wants the details to be historically correct.

Each painting tells part of a story he believes only he and the other astronauts who walked on the Moon can tell.

“This is what human beings do when they first go to another world,” he said, gesturing at a wall of his paintings in his studio. There is Pete Conrad clicking his heels, and Jack Schmitt trying to ski down a hill in the moon dust.

There is a self-portrait, his arms raised in celebration, sun gleaming off the golden visor. In another self-portrait he strikes a swashbuckling stance. “It shows a cocky attitude,” he explains. “I think you’ve got to be pretty cocky to believe you can go 240,000 miles in these fragile little vehicles and get back alive.”

Mr. Bean works slowly, finishing no more than seven paintings a year. All told, he has completed 168 and hopes to live long enough to make 200. He works in his modest home where the living room would ordinarily be, wearing a denim apron with his Apollo 12 patch sewn on it. He lives with his wife, Leslie, and their aged Lhasa apso, Puff Wuff. He has two grown children from a previous marriage.

He is philosophical about space exploration. He and the other Apollo astronauts assumed the next step would be a station on the Moon, then a mission to Mars, and then farther. But history goes in fits and starts, he points out. “There were 128 years between Columbus’s discovery of America and the Pilgrims’ showing up,” he said. “That’s the way things are done. We are not going back to the Moon anytime soon, in my opinion.”

He worries less these days about the future of the space program than about his legacy as a painter. He longs for a show in New York or another art capital.

“My whole goal was to do these paintings, and I figured my wife, Leslie, and my daughter, Amy, would someday try to make them well known in the art world,” he said. “Then I realized the best chance to get them known is while I’m around and people want to talk to me about it.”