Collection: Scott Listfield

A person who grew up in the last few decades of the 20th century can tell you one thing with certainty: if there’s a fully suited-up astronaut staring out at an Earth-ly landscape, something has gone horribly awry.

So in a way, it’s no surprise that Scott Listfield’s iconographic, sometimes heartbreaking oil paintings, featuring so many trappings of our modern lives, have in common the presence of an astronaut, whose viewpoint—often literally—becomes our own.

Listfield knew that he had to use the astronaut in his paintings after seeing the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey around the year 2000. That movie, like so many pieces of pop culture, gave a vision of the future that Listfield, now a part of that future, was not living. And his viewing of that movie coincided with a time of personal upheaval, as Listfield was sorting out issues of what it meant to be “home” and to be a young adult, as well as what kind of art he wanted to make. The astronaut was an impartial observer addressing feelings of alienation that were in fact very personal to Listfield.

Listfield was born in 1976 in Boston, Massachusetts, in the USA. He attended Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, settling on art as a major. He spent time studying in Italy, returned to the USA to complete his studies and then moved to Australia for 6 months before returning to the USA again. He noted that when living in a new place even for a bit of time, it didn’t feel like home because there was an awareness that he was from elsewhere: he had to learn new things about the culture of the places he was living, and people around him were aware that he was a nonnative as soon as he spoke. On the other hand, when he returned to the USA, it didn’t feel like home again either for quite a while, between the natural displacement of having lived among other cultures and the naturally shifting sands of young adulthood.

As he considered how he wanted to pursue art during that time, he realized that he wanted to give voice to that feeling of looking again at the USA from the feeling of being an outsider, which he still carried. The astronaut became the perfect observer: human (at least presumably) but genderless, the astronaut could represent any of us.

While much of Listfield’s earlier work focused on how intertwined our natural landscape had become with symbols of the corporate world, his later work has expanded to include commentary on the environment, our predilection for warfare, and American politics. This was a natural outgrowth of having built his audience. When the economy soured around 2008/2009, and a lot of galleries with which he had had relationships closed, Listfield had to get proactive about getting his work seen by people: he used social media and art websites to the fullest advantage and eventually built a large online community.

But with that community came responsibility, in his eyes: he now had a platform, and through his art, he could give voice to the things that so many around him were feeling. Thus, both the imagery and the conception behind his pieces became more complex.

Listfield seeks to tell stories through his paintings, and the story he is telling is ours.