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Scott Listfield Scott Listfield's paintings of astronauts observing the banalities of modern life are both humorous and surreal. Scott studied and worked in the US, Italy and Australia before coming back to the states to finally study design at the Massachusetts College of Art and began his compulsion to paint guys in spacesuits.
The second of Scott's dual obsessions is taking photographs of his small plastic dinosaur wherever he goes in the world, creating a scrapbook of strange adventures, which include "defacing priceless works of antiquity" as he poses in the British Museum. So, it's not your everyday kind of stuff, then...
PIXELSURGEON: Tell us when did it all begin?
SCOTT: If by "it" you mean "me", well, I was born in Boston in the fall of 1976. I've been drawing since I was a kid but I really kind of sucked at it until I got more serious about it in college (although I guess you could argue that I never really totally stopped sucking at it). I've been working primarily, well, exclusively, on the astronaut-dinosaur thing for about five years now.
What is your favourite format, material and canvas?
This is a boring answer: oil on canvas. But I also like taking digital pictures because I'm a terrible photographer and I can take 350 pictures and then delete the 348 bad ones and people will say "Hey, you're a pretty good photographer," and I'll say "Yeah I know."
What is the astronaut/dinosaur philosophy all about?
I had been thinking for a while about making paintings that were sort of short stories about the world. I wanted to create a character that could walk around a bit, explore in a sort of anthropological sense, as if he were part of this world, but maybe a little removed. One night in 1999 I was watching 2001: A Space Odyssey, and of course it was supposed to be happening in the year 2001, but it seemed unlikely to me at the time that mankind would be able to develop interplanetary space travel and evil super-computers in just two short years (and, as it turns out, we didn't). Our idea of the future 30 or 40 years ago was pretty amusingly wrong. But although there are no robot butlers, hotels on the moon, or flying cars which fold up into brief-cases, the present is a pretty weird place. Did anybody foresee mini vans, Starbucks, iMacs, and Hip Hop videos? So I thought who better to explore our present than an astronaut from the future of the past? (Did that make sense?)
As for the dinosaurs, they appear in my paintings because I really like dinosaurs and I wanted to paint some. Well, that, and in sci-fi comics (and in Jurassic Park), for some reason the future is always inhabited by dinosaurs. Even though they're representative of the distant past, people always want to place them in the future as well. It's an odd anachronism that I kind of like. If you want to think of it as a past/present/future kind of thing, go right ahead. But mostly I just like dinosaurs.
I also have a plastic dinosaur named Dinosaur that I carry around with me pretty much everywhere I go.
Do you draw stuff outside of this specific context?
Nope. Don't have the time. I used to almost exclusively work on self-portraits. My parents are glad I gave that up as it was kind of creepy (although I'm not really sure how they feel about astronauts). A number of years ago, in my last spring at college, I noticed that all the fraternity guys were buying puppies in order to impress the ladies. Not having a place to put a real puppy, and not having a lot of my own natural talent with the ladies, I sculpted a dog out of plaster and put it on casters and towed it around campus on a leash for a few weeks. His name was Art and it actually worked pretty well until Art's leg fell off and it kept toppling over on its face and left a somber trail of plaster dust in its wake. It was at this point I think that the ladies stopped taking notice, or at least in a good way. So I mostly just paint astronauts now.
What music do you listen to, and do you listen to music while painting?
I always listen to music while I paint. Back in the day it was probably some Bobby Brown or Bell Biv Devoe. Nowadays it's more like Gonzales, Missy Elliot, George Michael, Kylie Minogue, Busta Rhymes, Laptop, Interpol, something by the guys at DFA, and pretty much anything by the Neptunes. I'm kind of 25% hip and 75% super un-hip. Sometimes musical artists make their way into my paintings, but it's not really just a matter of who I'm listening to. Like Busta Rhymes, who I've painted twice, I think, has a visual style (both in person, and in his videos) that I really admire. And I figured, you know, if I'm creating this whole alternate world in my paintings, why the hell can't Busta Rhymes wander through? I think of it kind of like a cameo, I guess, like when you watch the Love Boat, which is also a weird alternate world, and Ernest Borgnine walks by, and you're thinking "Wow, that's Ernest Borgnine. I wonder if we (the Love Boat audience) is supposed to recognize him as Ernest Borgnine the actor, or if he's playing a character in this episode of Love Boat." It's a little ambiguous. I like that.
What are your favourite movies?
Stanley Kubrick's 2001 served as sort of a launching point for my paintings, but I don't usually watch a lot of movies. Or, rather, I don't usually like a lot of the movies I watch. Star Wars and the BBC series Walking with Dinosaurs are exceptions and have provided some pretty self-evident inspiration.
Favourite artists?
In vaguely alphabetical order:
The design teams at Nike and Apple
Phillip Guston
Damien Hirst
George Lucas (only the period before 1985, though. These new movies he's making? They never happened.)
Pablo Picasso's harlequin paintings
NASA (OK, NASA isn't an artist)
The Neptunes (Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo)
Marc Newson
Busta Rhymes
Jorn Utzon
David Foster Wallace
Hype Williams
Biggest single influence?
Probably my friend Chris Ostoj who passed away last year. Which I'm not saying just as an homage thing. He was a brilliant guy and taught me more about art in one year than I'll ever learn in the rest of my life and it pisses me off that if I ever make it as an artist that he won't be around to see it.
If you weren't drawing now, what would you be doing?
Actually I don't do much drawing, aside from preparatory work from my paintings. If I weren't painting now, what would I be doing? For a long time I didn't like the idea of painting because it's kind of like trying to become really great at Latin. It's a language that is quite possibly dying. And I wasn't using that language to really speak to anyone anyways, I was making paintings and putting them in my closet. I finally started getting back into it just because I enjoyed the process and I was a much better painter than I was at anything else I tried (I wrote about 150 pages of the worst book ever). I guess what I'm saying is that I could live without painting, but I'd have to do at least SOMETHING vaguely creative.
Do you draw for a living, or do you support yourself in other ways?
No, and I don't think I want to try. I usually can't bring myself to even sell a painting. OK, maybe they're just astronauts (and some dinosaurs) but I think of them as sort of strange autobiographies, and it seems weird to try and make money off of that. And frankly I don't know that there's a huge market for astronaut paintings. So I work full time as a designer for a small company called Visual i/o (we make detailed interactive visualizations for companies with too much data). I paint at night and on the weekends, and yeah it would be nice to have more time, but I like that I don't have to rely on my art to pay the rent. I admire those who can and do, but just the thought makes me feel kind of uncomfortable.
What kind of feedback do you get from people, and how does that translate into your work?
Generally people say to me "Oh, astronauts." and I say "Er, yup." As you might imagine this kind of interaction has a great influence on my work. Sometimes my girlfriend Joanna wanders into my studio and will say something like "the Brachiasaurus is kind of floating." And I get mad at her for like three weeks and then I realize that the Brachiasaurus is kind of floating. Up until I launched my website www.astronautdinosaur.com a year or two ago, I made my paintings and kept them in a closet (of course, at the time my painting studio was a closet). Now I get some emails, and I guess my work is out there, but I don't really hear a lot about it. Nobody tells me it sucks, so I guess that's good.
How do your surroundings affect your creation?
I grew up in Massachusetts, and I still live in the Boston area. I don't know that living in this part of the world has had a direct influence on my work (I do drive like an asshole, though, which is very Massachusetts), although I do think that living in America, and particularly the popular-television-watching America, has had a huge effect on my work. In particular, going to other parts of the world and then coming back and realizing how strong the TV and commercial culture is here.
Other places I've been, particularly Australia, have had more of an obvious visual influence, partly because painting the Sydney Opera House is a way of reminiscing about the Sydney Opera House, but also because that whole part of Sydney feels like a massive architectural fantasy land. Like all that utopia stuff the Modernists proposed actually suddenly worked. Art and design and land and water and sky have combined forces to battle evil in one special moment in the southern hemisphere. And the icecream there is really good, too.
Where do you see yourself artistically ten years from now?
Oh, I don't know. I'd like to say having a show at the Guggenheim or something, but I don't usually like the art at the Guggenheim and the people at the Guggenheim probably don't like the art that I do. I try not to get ahead of myself when it comes to art because so much of it is out of your hands. If an important gallery owner walks by tomorrow and loves my paintings, I could be famous in a week. Most likely they'll pass me by and go straight for the guy working in feces installations. But so what? We all poop. I guess if I'm not too bitter to paint in ten years then that's a fair accomplishment.
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