Scott Listfield

Scott Listfield is known mainly for his paintings, which all feature a lone exploratory astronaut lost in a landscape cluttered with pop culture icons, corporate logos, and tongue-in-cheek science fiction references. But he is also known for his photographs of a plastic dinosaur named Dinosaur.

Based now in Somerville, Massachusetts, Listfield spent some time working in Sydney, Australia and Florence, Italy before returning to his native New England. Right around the year 2001, Scott began painting astronauts and, sometimes, dinosaurs. He now lives in with his wife Joanna. His paintings have appeared in the 2005 Northeastern edition of New American Paintings, and he has been profiled in the Boston Globe, the Somerville News, and online at bigredandshiny.com. He is represented in Boston by Gallery Locco Ritoro. Recently he has shown in Los Angeles and Santa Monica, and in venues along the East coast.

About his work, Scott has this to say:

"I paint astronauts and, sometimes, dinosaurs.

Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey was released in 1968, which was about 8 years before I was born, so I have no firsthand knowledge of how it was received. I do not know if people genuinely believed we'd be living in space in 2001. If we'd have robot butlers and flying cars, geodesic lunar homes with sustaina"ble gardens, and genetically reconstituted dinosaurs helping or eating the human population. But from Lost in Space to the Jetsons to Jurassic Park, it seems that popular culture craved and fomented this space-age perception of the future. Generations raised on these programs, movies, comic books, and novels are now grown and living in a future filled with mini vans, Starbucks, iMacs, and Hip Hop videos. In many ways, the year 2001, like 1984 before it, failed to live up to expectations. In hindsight, these expectations appear almost comical. And yet the world today is strange and unusual in ways unimagined in 1957, when Sputnik was launched, or in 1968, when 2001 was released, or even in 1990 at the dawn of the world wide web. The present is in fact a very unusual place, and it's strangest in the ubiquity of things we take for granted.

The astronaut in my paintings is simply here to explore the present."

Scott is a fan of the British pop group The Spice Girls, stylish jackets, and fried rice.

Early career

Scott attended high school in the town of Weston,_Massachusetts in the suburbs of Boston. Among his classmates at Weston High School, Massachusetts were Chris Melling, who appeared on MTV's Road_Rules:_Europe, Boston attorney Nick Madden of Ropes & Gray, Boston Shakespeare Competition Winner, Shawn Cody, and New York physician Henry Wei. Scott first cut his teeth in the world of art in the art studios of Weston High School, housed in a cubical concrete structure attached to the school itself and beneath the library.

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