SCOTT LISTFIELD

The DIADEM Interview

Collector and DIADEM contributor Michael Cavendish (“DD”) interviewed artist Scott Listfield (“SL”) on February 20, 2014.

DD: Writers are said to have a voice, which is like a musician’s tone. It is a tincture to the story they are telling that oozes from their language choices, their cadence. When I look at your astronaut pictures, when I look right at the black face shield of the protagonist, I see a unique voice, a really unique tone. Do you see something like that forming as you get into a painting? Is there a point of view you find you are consistently putting out there that you can see even as the unfinished paint is drying?

SL: I do think of each individual piece as a short story in a larger narrative I’m telling. For me, the process doesn’t really take shape as I’m working on the piece. More like, it happens as I’m thinking about it before I even start.

Sometimes I’ll have an idea that doesn’t quite fit with the tone I’m trying to set. It’s too snarky, too overly serious, or melodramatic.

And I also like to sprinkle in a little overt humor every now and again. If I’ve done too many serious pieces in a row, I know that I’ll need to do something a little bit more . . . ridiculous.

DD: I can’t fathom how painters who can do hyperrealism or photorealism first figure out that if they use a certain kind of paint and brush they can make that leap. When and how did you first unlock that talent, the ability to render paint into photo-like detail?

SL: To be honest, I don’t really consider myself a photorealist.

I work a lot from photographs, so my paintings tend to look a little like photographs. But I don’t actively try to mimic the look of a photograph, and if you check them out up close, there’s no doubt they’re actually paintings.

But I appreciate the sentiment, as I assume you’re implying you think my paintings aren’t bad.

As far as my quote-unquote talent goes, there wasn’t really an “aha” moment or some revelation about technique or materials.

Like most people, I sucked at painting when I started. I got moderately better only after working at it over a number of years.

But right from the start I wanted to paint things representationally, and I’d challenge myself by painting things like hair, or cars, or Dr. Zoidberg.

Frankly, it still surprises me when I pull it off.

DD: You create a consistent quantity of work over a series of years and spread it out among a number of smaller galleries, many of which are web-friendly. Is it a challenge keeping up with so many commercial relationships while you are trying to do this very demanding practice with these little realism gems you make?

SL: It sure is. I work full time in addition to making paintings, so I’ve had to, over the years, figure out a way to streamline my process so that I can continue to make paintings in limited time. I’m pretty comfortable with my process by this point. I know what I can and cannot do. It’s a comfort that’s allowed me to be a bit more efficient, to make more paintings and make—I hope—better paintings, in less time.

DD: Debates rage about Melville and how much metaphor he consciously wrote into his novels. I look at the astronaut series, and especially the works where the astronaut is poised to evoke loneliness, or a loss of direction, and the metaphor spins out at me. I see Generation X, I see 21st century America, I see humanity afloat in the floods of tech and the virtual. Am I seeing things that could not be there, or do you leave room in the work for metaphor and allegory?

SL: Funny you mention Melville. I sort of bumbled my way through Moby Dick a couple summers ago, and I both loved it and hated it. It felt strikingly modern and also maybe a million years old. Which I guess is why I liked it.

But, to the question, I do, very deliberately, leave the face mask on the astronaut blank.

I want people to project whatever it is that they are feeling onto him.

Sometimes the specifics are very much intentional, sometimes I’m happy to let each person project whatever their own ideas are into the piece.

DD: What are the pros and cons of painting a character into a sequence of works, over and over again?

SL: Well, the cons are probably pretty obvious. As much as I love painting astronauts, it does get tiring, every now and again, to paint the same thing over and over again.

So—why do I do it? Because I think of my work as an ongoing narrative. The type of idea I can’t convey in just a small handful of pieces.

I want it to feel as if the astronaut is literally an explorer. You’re not sure where he’s come from, you’re not sure where’s he’s headed, but it seems like he’s seen a lot. It’s helpful, in that sense, if he has, actually, seen a lot.

DD: What I like about your sense of composition is that you have what appears to be a second artist inside you, like a photographer alter ego who can position what you want to paint so that even the ugliest subject, I am thinking the cracked airplane runway in a painting like The Runaway, becomes a really grabbing visual element. What is composition like for you? How deliberate, or effortless is it?

SL: Well nothing is really ever effortless. Everything takes time and work.

But the details are often important. I remember reading something about Star Wars a long time ago—pardon the pun—that talked about how George Lucas wanted every spaceship in that movie to feel dinged up, stained, charred, broken, and lived in. As if the future weren’t anything particularly special.

DD: I loved Star Wars for that. That grit and dirt made it so much more real to me than Star Trek.

SL: Right. To Lucas, they’d use their objects just like we use ours. I try to take that to heart. I often find the most interesting part of a scene might be in some forgotten corner we might generally disregard.

So, with composition, for my day job I work as a designer. It has definitely informed the way I think about the structure of a painting.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the particulars, the placement of each object.

Somebody once said something about the very best design being almost imperceptible. I’m not sure I entirely believe that, but the more natural it appears, the less you notice it, and the more I’m doing my job.

DD: Do you draw much, either creatively or in preparation for the paintings? If you draw, what materials do you draw with?

SL: No, not really. There’s a sort of romantic idea of the artist drawing in his notepad, and you’d be hard pressed to find an art teacher who doesn’t push you to draw constantly. But over the years I’ve had to streamline my process considerably.

I work full time in addition to making paintings, so my time is precious. I don’t really have the chance to do anything that isn’t directly contributing towards a finished piece.

I do draw a little bit in various stages of preparing a piece, but it is only drawing in that I literally use a pencil. But there’s not a lot of free form exploration in that portion of my process.

DD: There is just so much cultural capital in using your paints to create something new—the astronaut and the wordless stories of the scenes surrounding—as opposed to redrawing or repainting so many of the characters that are supposed to be memes or demi-icons for the culture. Were you ever tempted in the opposite direction, tempted to just crank out a bunch of commissions for COMIC CON fans wanting another, like, Breaking Bad homage ink drawing of Walter?

SL: I’ve heard the words “fan art” tossed around pejoratively a lot over the years, and to be honest, I don’t totally agree with that.

The things people are passionate about today aren’t any less valid than, say, making illustrations based on mythology was a couple hundred years ago.

Just because a character isn’t yours—something you yourself invented, doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of creativity that can be mined from it.

I mean, when I first started these paintings, there wasn’t really anybody else making paintings of astronauts, at least to my knowledge. But I didn’t come up with the idea of an astronaut. It’s a symbol I’ve borrowed from a larger cultural context because it meant something to me.

I actually don’t see the astronaut as being all that different than, say, Spiderman, or Optimus Prime, other than he is less specifically associated with one movie or show or comic book.

I do like to think that I take it in a direction that differentiates it from the work of others, even though my work is built on top of bits and pieces of pop culture that we probably all recognize.

So I have no problem at all with people making homages to their favorite movies, but I always wanted my work to feel like I was talking about those same things, except filtered through my personal experience.

DD: How long does it take you to paint one of the really detailed machines some of your paintings have, like an aircraft carrier or a large automobile?

SL: Well, I like painting those types of things, so maybe not as long as you’d suspect.

I don’t really keep track of how long individual parts of paintings take me, but typically I’ll spend two to four weeks on a painting.

DD: Your backgrounds are detailed, and it seems like because of the demands of time and labor that keep your canvasses fairly small. Is there a project in your future where you do super detail in the foreground but let the background fuzz out a bit so that you can get a much larger image onto canvas? Would that challenge you in a new way

SL: It’s an interesting idea. Offhand I’m not sure how I’d pull off a larger swath of a painting with limited detail.

I’m always looking for ways to be a more efficient painter. By that I mean, I think the level of detail in my paintings has gone up in recent years, while the time it takes me to paint them has actually gone down.

I’m not sure there are any fast tricks I can do to speed things up though, which is why I’ve generally painted smaller works lately.

I have my standards, and I wouldn’t feel comfortable releasing a painting that isn’t correct and up to snuff.

DD: There was this historian, David Courtwright, who wrote a book, Sky as Frontier, which makes the case that American culture, to progress and to not cave back in upon itself, has always depended on a frontier, an edge to our civilization, an edge where her young people could go and get their rage and their dreams tested and sorted out, far from the delicate womb of polite society.

SL: That’s fairly poetic.

DD: I cannot be exceeded in paraphrasing! And, but so, the Appalachians and the Indian tribes were a frontier, then the west, then aviation—the sky was literally the next frontier—and then, you could argue, a series of very large wars. Do you think about something like a frontier, or a lost frontier, when you conceive your astronaut works?

SL: I like the idea, although I don’t know if people think about the world that way anymore.

Our frontiers these days might be more abstract. Certainly forty, fifty years ago, you could have said that space was that frontier.

Maybe technology is that frontier now? Anyhow, I’m not sure if I think about something like that exactly in my work.

But I do feel like we lost the idea of space as being representative of the future.

Which maybe, as far as my painting goes, is not a bad thing.

I mean, science fiction from the 60's and 70's feels just as futuristic now as it did then, you know, if you’re willing to overlook some dubious special effects.

That horizon line of the future hasn’t really moved any closer, not in my lifetime.

Which I think makes it possible to blend the past, present, and future together in the way I do.

DD: Just on pure merit, pure originality and quality of the pictures against others in the market place, I can make the case that your work should cost more than it does. What’s the pricing dynamic you see for artists who are not yet on whole pages in ArtForum? Is there a ceiling artists are bumping into? Is it the marketing and showing costs, magazine ads, fair booths that are the prohibiting factor? Are we living with two art worlds, one a luxury, Hermes scarf-type of world and the other the traditional studio-easel-paints art world where prices inch up gradually with more shows and more mature work offered each year? What is it like to live with whatever pricing forces you are saddled with right now?

SL: Well I certainly appreciate that sentiment, and I’ll be sure to hire you as my business manager when I get my things in order.

DD: My commissions would be confiscatory.

SL: But the truth is that there are at least two very distinct art markets.

There’s the one where people are buying Andy Warhols and Van Goghs for hundreds of millions of dollars, and then there’s the world I live in.

I’m sure most people would describe it more as a spectrum, but I’ll be honest, the upper middle class of that range, say, $50,000, feels just as far away to me as the Warhol stratosphere.

The fact is, and I’m proud of this fact, that most of my paintings are bought by people who are relatively young and not extremely wealthy.

I think, maybe 10 or 15 years ago, people in the art world didn’t think this market existed.

Art was, for the most part, dependent on the wealthy, pretty much top to bottom.

And I’m not trying to be classist here or anything. If a billionaire wants to buy my work, that’s awesome.

But at heart I’m a populist. I want to make art that a lot of people like, not just art insiders.

Most people like that can’t be paying the equivalent of a Lexus for a painting, and I’m not sure I would want them to, either.

I like that my art is affordable. And, to be honest, the last few years is the first time that my work has really been selling steadily.

I’m probably going to creep my prices up a bit to keep up with the increased demand, but I’m not interested in pricing out the people who have been supporting my art up until now.

DD: There’s something in your work that makes me guess that if you wanted to, you could paint, or send the astronaut around to encounter within your paint, scenes reflecting today, 2014 and on, not unlike the way that Rockwell made art that reflected something about their day specific to the found subject, as opposed to some character or protagonist. We may not live in the visual era that was Rockwell’s, with this collision of new toasters and old barber chairs, and so forth, but we live in an era with a lot of collisions and with new visual icons underway. Do you think you will explore the found subjects in our American life some more, either with or without the astronaut?

SL: Well, I think the world in my paintings is a kind of mix of today, yesterday, and the future.

I want the general atmosphere to feel like something contemporary, not a nostalgic world of the past, not a vision of the distant future.

But I also hesitate to paint things that are too “in the moment.” I want my work to have a shelf life.

I’m not going to, say, make a reference to, Bieber, because, let’s be frank, I don’t think people are going to care about Justin Bieber in five or ten years.

DD: One of the things I have to compliment you on is doing your part to make photorealism exciting again. You know, Velasquez and all the historic greats put a sword or something dramatic in a painting every so often to ramp up the drama. A mild criticism I have of the leading American contemporary realists of the post-war era is that they were content to paint Chevy Vegas on an unassuming street, or just a woman in sunglasses. I fault them for being just a little too twee about what their pictures looked like at the expense of choosing subjects. Tell me how conscious you are of putting cool stuff into your tableaux.

SL: Well . . . thanks, although again, I don’t really consider myself a photorealist.

I do think, back in the days when photorealism was a movement, those artists were trying to capture the look and feel of a photograph, and didn’t actually care about the content much at all. But it was a different time back then.

Abstraction and minimalism were king. Not many people were making paintings with narrative content.

Anyhow, it occurred to me early in my career, before I was even particularly adept at painting actual things, that just because I was a realist painter did not mean I had to paint things that I could see before my eyes.

Why couldn’t I paint a robot or a dinosaur into one of my paintings?

It’s not like I was an impressionist landscape painter, with my easel out in a field, capturing exactly what I saw in front of me.

That thought might seem pretty self-explanatory now, but it felt like a big revelation to me at the time.

I’m very happy that, over the last ten or fifteen years, there have been a lot of other artists coming up who seem to feel the exact same way.

DD: Could you teach what you do to an apprentice? Should American painters who can do what you do train circles of apprentices like the Renaissance and Baroque era masters did? Would we not have The Last Supper without apprentices who learned to paint just like the master and therefore allowed the master to make more, and larger, and more complex works for the public?

SL: I very much like the idea of an apprentice, and not just because I’d like some help. It would be a great way to revive old traditions and ways of doing things which I think, after the last 50 or 100 years of industrialization, people are again realizing have a lot of value.

But the truth is that I do almost everything myself. I have no idea where I’d even begin teaching someone else to help me out.

I’m just way too much of a control freak for that.

They’d probably just end up sitting in a corner of my studio playing Angry Birds, or something.

DD: Do you have any relationships with collectors of your work? What would be more satisfying to you, a public exhibit that is well attended and that gets, say, newspaper mention, or a significant relationship with a known collector who becomes a fan and a custodian of your works, in a “the Rubells” type of fashion?

SL: Some of my collectors I know personally, and some have reached out to me through emails, and I always deeply appreciate that. My work, like most people’s art, is very personal.

Even when I sell it, it’s nice to have a continuing relationship with it, which I can through the people who buy it. Plus, I still find it amazing when somebody likes my work enough to pay money for it and to put it on their wall and live with it. It’s a pretty amazing compliment, really.

All that said, my real goal is, and always has been, to show my work.

Selling is nice. But not everybody can afford to buy artwork.

But anybody can go see it in a gallery, or online.

Also, maybe I’m a little bit vain. Id’ rather have it seen by millions than by a few. Art has much more of a shelf life, the more people get to see it.

A work that sells right out of my studio won’t be experienced by all that many people, which, truth be told, bums me out a little.

DD: Speaking of media coverage, you have had a good shake of it from the bylines and reviews listed on your artist’s site. What have your media mentions done for you? How hard were they to get? What angle or question did those stores never cover that you wish could have been included?

SL: I feel really fortunate to have found people—writers, bloggers, guys with weird Tumblrs—who really like my work. I really want people to see and experience my work, and media is the way this happens now.

I’ll be honest, traditional media, newspapers, magazines, doesn’t do as much as it used to. Although it’s still pretty cool when it happens.

But a blog post on a well-trafficked site can get thousands of eyeballs on my work in no time at all.

Which I find to be one of the more amazing things about the times we live in.

DD: Is there a particular city or gallery that you want to do a show in? Actors are always asked what director they’d love to work with. Where and with whom would you like to work in the next few years?

SL: Oh, of course. I mean, I already consider myself fortunate to have shown in a number of amazing galleries in amazing cities.

It’s allowed me to travel and meet fans and artists in L.A., San Francisco, Miami, New York. Lots of other places.

My art career has already been more successful than I ever thought it would be.

That said, there are certain galleries I’d love to work with.

Just to name a few: Jonathan Levine and Joshua Liner in New York, Roq La Rue in Seattle, White Walls in San Francisco, Corey Helford in L.A.

I’d love to show more in Europe and in Australia. But we’ll see.

The art world is a crazy place, and I learned a while back to take what comes your way, and not to get too far ahead of yourself.

DD: The astronauts you have done have seemed to resonate louder and longer and better than some of the other protagonists you could have tried. Are there subjects that are just too tricky or awkward to render into a visual form that is aesthetic, compelling, and outside of that ((<<donk>>)), that sour note factor that holds people back from reaching for paintings of certain subjects?

SL: Probably. I feel like I was lucky to stumble onto the idea of painting astronauts. It works really well as a metaphor, they look cool, and they’re fun to paint. If I had decided, all those years ago, to paint, I don’t know, porcupines, I’d probably be really mad at myself right now.

DD: What does your studio look like, and what do you want to do to it, in terms of making it different or better, or just additionally stimulating to you?

SL: My studio is pretty simple. I mount paintings up on the walls, I use a crusty old palette, and I have some lights in the ceiling.

And a life-sized cardboard cutout of Chewbacca.

DD: Awesome.

SL: Yeah. And I hate the cold, so I could never have one of those unheated warehouse spaces.

But otherwise, I’m really not that picky.

I don’t need, like, southern light, or a comfy couch.

Or an espresso machine.

Just enough room to stand and paint.

Scott Listfield is on the web at www.astronautdinosaur.com.

N.1. this text courtesy of DIADEM Art Papers by Cavendish Projects.

N.2. all text copyright the author and the artist.

N.3. Cavendish Projects is on Twitter and Medium @cavprojects