Scott Listfield’s Post

If you were ever curious how I make my paintings, it looks a little something like this. Just slower. This is about 3 weeks of painting time, crammed into a minute, of me working on one of the largest paintings I’ve ever made. It’s one of three 60x40 inch canvases I made for my current show Oh, Dystopia, which runs through September 14th at Thinkspace Projects in Los Angeles. Fun fact: my studio walls aren’t really that tall so I painted the entire bottom portion on my knees. My joints died so that this painting could live! Totally worth it.

My latest show Oh, Dystopia, about finding the beauty in the end of things, opens THIS SATURDAY, 6-10pm, at Thinkspace Projects in Los Angeles. It’s something of a return to form / greatest hits show for me, as I dug back into my frequent sources of inspiration: crumbling skyscrapers, giant donuts, sweeping landscapes, remains of lost fast food restaurants, and the occasional buffalo. I also painted some of the largest and most detailed work of my life. I’m really proud of this show and I hope you’ll come out to check it out this weekend if you’re in the LA area. I also hope you got yourself on the Thinkspace email list because the show preview just went out! Didn’t get it? Drop me a line and I’ll see what I can do! Thanks, everyone, and hopefully see some of you on the 24th!

Are you feeling stressed or anxious? Has the erosion of democracy and the feeling of impending societal collapse got you down? Are you tired of technological solutions no one asked for? Worn out by end stage capitalism? Sick of social media? Billionaires? Traffic? War? The Supreme Court? Well then, have I got just the thing for you! “Oh, Dystopia,” my latest solo show, is about finding beauty in the end of things. It opens Saturday, August 24th, 6-10pm at Thinkspace Projects in Los Angeles. Friends, let's go off into the end times together. We'll frolic amongst the leftover bits of our civilization: Crumbling skyscrapers! Partially destroyed machines! Piles of trash! A giant donut! Sad robots! The remains of a sunburnt Earth! We'll leave our names on a broken building and hope that our distant ancestors find it one day and remember us. It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine. Scenes from a semi-dystopian future have long been a big part of my work, and I wanted to lean into it with this show, but in a way that felt.. kind of fun? It just feels like everything has been doom and gloom for so long and I’m tired of it. I wanted to celebrate the possibility that we could send messages out to those who come long after us. Maybe intentional, or maybe just whatever pieces of our weird society remain for someone (or something) to find. In this large painting (60x40 inches!), arguably the most ambitious thing I’ve ever done, I was inspired by the giant graffiti tower that sprung up here in LA on an unfinished high rise building earlier this year. I loved the idea of turning this enormous slab of forgotten concrete and glass into a monument to those people bold enough to climb it and leave their mark. In my version, the vertical names across the top are close friends who I have lost along the way. The many names written along the side compose most of my family tree, going back as far as I can trace it. It’s about leaving some kind of legacy. About having the courage to carve out our own names and hope that in some way they last the test of time. If you're in LA on the 24th, stop by and say hi! If you think you might be interested in something from this show, or just want a sneak preview, definitely head over to https://lnkd.in/da_cGbZv and sign up for their email list. The preview will go out on Monday, August 19th, ahead of the show.

Prints available now! Proceeds from this one got to help Thinkspace Projects dig out from medical bills from the loss of cofounder Shawn Vezinaw. Grab one before they’re gone! https://lnkd.in/gJydBGtJ

Here's a story about a wolf. It begins a long time ago when a younger version of me went to Europe for the first time. I studied in Italy. I walked cobblestone streets. So many cobblestone streets. I rode trains and saw places I might never see again. I came home and those journeys eventually inspired me to paint astronauts. Last fall I traveled to Europe again. I began in Copenhagen, and spent the next 10 days going north, to Sweden, and then Oslo, Norway for a gallery show I was supposed to be having. A show I found out just before I was supposed to leave, had been canceled. This happened for a very sad and extremely valid reason but it left me traveling Europe, alone, on a trip that suddenly had no real purpose. But it was about to find one. From Oslo I flew to Riga, Latvia and met up with my brother. We spent the next week traveling through Latvia and Lithuania to the places where our ancestors once lived. I didn't have any preconceived notions as to how this part of the trip would go. There would be no long lost Listfield’s to find. No one in my family is left in this part of the world. I guess I wanted to see where I come from. I wanted to walk the same cobblestone streets my ancestors once did. I didn't expect anything profound to happen. But it did. Our trip ended in Vilnius, Lithuania's charming capital city. Arriving late and tired from the road, we wound up by chance walking along the river. The sun was setting, and it was a mild September night. People were about. Lots of people. My brother noticed it first: something was happening. That's when we saw the wolf. On the riverbank just ahead of us was a large statue of a wolf. Looming over it was an ancient castle tower, perched precariously on a hill. As the last bit of sunlight faded, the wolf spoke. I don’t speak Lithuanian, but some quick googling revealed that the wolf told the story of the founding of Vilnius. It spoke in a booming voice, with occasional pauses as music swelled. Fire from an unknown source danced around the wolf and eventually, as the night wore on, it was engulfed in flames. Smoke and hot ash fell on our faces. I wondered if we were a safe enough distance away. As the fire subsumed, we wandered off, dazed, with hundreds of Vilnius residents. We had just celebrated the fall equinox and the 700th anniversary of the founding of Vilnius. It felt like we had just been part of something very primeval. I felt Lithuanian. I felt pagan. I felt wolf. I returned to my hotel room, ash still on my face. My next show THE EQUINOX opens March 21, 2024 at StolenSpace Gallery in London, and features 9 new paintings of an astronaut traveling to some of the places I visited on this trip, accompanied by a wolf who appears in one form or another in each of them. Sometimes as a companion, sometimes as a statue, a relic, a mural, a ghost, or a metaphor. Epilogue: My third great grandfather was born in the small town of Šėta, Lithuania in 1837. His name was Wolfe.

Ever since I started painting astronauts, I’ve been wondering: What will the future look like? I asked 45 artists the same question. Announcing THE SCI-FI SHOW, a pop-up gallery exhibit curated by me and the fine folks at Gallery 1988. What does a future filled with robots actually look like? Will we get to Mars? What happens when we ignore all of the warning signs and let AI replace much of human creativity and decision making? Are we going to be living in a Waterworld? What dumb thing will Elon Musk do next? At what point does the internet just get piped into our brain? Am I going to have to have conversations with my refrigerator? WHERE IS MY FLYING CAR? Is the metaverse a thing? Is the multiverse a thing?? Does the future still feel optimistic or are we just waiting to see which dystopia wins out in the end? I have a lot of questions about how the future might look, and I don't want an algorithm to draw them. The Sci-Fi show opens Friday January 5th, 2024, 7-9PM, and will be on display for ONE NIGHT ONLY as a pop-up event here in Los Angeles, the city of the future, at 1056 S Fairfax Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90019. The show features work by 45 artists, including 5 brand new paintings by me. All work from the show will go live on the Gallery 1988 website on January 6th, 2024 at 11:00 AM PST.

I’m really excited about this one, you guys! My first ever baseball card is now available to purchase from House of Roulx. Grab one here - https://lnkd.in/g_PxJc7z Each Fenway card comes in a really cool package with about a one in three chance of getting a cool variant or a signed version of the card, either by me or by famed Red Sox pitcher Bill “Spaceman” Lee. Some variants have historical artifacts embedded in them - pieces from Fenway Park, game used baseballs, and even authentic NASA spacefligh items! Also, each card comes with a small promo pack of teaser cards for our upcoming larger release. Sometime in 2024 we’ll be expanding to full packs and boxes with something like 100 different cards! But these collectible promo packs will only be available in this Fenway release. Is that not enough for you? We’ve also got extra large cards for sale! 18x25, limited Edison, and signed by both me and Bill “Spaceman” Lee! So head over to the House of Roulx website and grab one, while supplies last!

Coming soon! Scott Listfield baseball cards. Grab Fenway on November 29th, and stay tuned for a whole series coming soon! More info here - https://lnkd.in/gaNH6FQi

I've got a new show coming soon to Beinart Gallery called UNREAL. It feels like we're on the cusp of a new age and it's been making me a bit nervous. Are we living in the last days of human creativity? Will our movies be written and directed by machines and our songs by robots? Our art created by unseen AI? Will we ever again be able to trust that a photograph is real? That the Wes Anderson movie we are watching was made by Wes Anderson and not a Wes Anderson algorithm? Will my smart appliances take it personally when I don't want to have a conversation with them and launch a nuclear strike? I don't have the answer to any of these questions, and I'm not sure anyone else does, either. But it sure does feel right now like we're at the end of something, and the beginning of something else, doesn't it? Unreal is a show of new paintings about how the lines between our digital lives and our real lives has blurred beyond recognition. Maybe we're in the Matrix or maybe we ARE the Matrix. Either way, it's becoming increasingly hard to determine what is and what is not real. We seem to be at an inflection point, and instead of listening to the advice of, gee, every single movie I've ever seen, we're barreling ahead full steam into an AI age. All of the paintings in this show were made by a human, but maybe they won't be for long. Unreal opens October 28th 6-9pm at Beinart Gallery in Melbourne, Australia. Stay tuned, world, for what comes next. If you'd like a sneak preview of this show, coming soon, make sure you sign up for the Beinart Gallery email list here: https://lnkd.in/grBMCP5E

OH MY GOD IT’S A MIRAGE Prints are now available at The People's Printshop of SABOTAGE, from my recent show AM Gold at Harman Projects. Run down those motel stairs, hop in your unmarked sedan, peel out over a hill, and mash this link to grab one before they’re gone. 'Cause what you see you might not get. https://lnkd.in/gSyyHfC4