12/12/07
Text: Ramsey Dau
As a child, Australian-born artist Anthony Lister spent lazy afternoons drawing on scraps of butcher paper on the floor of his grandma’s house. She too was an artist, and perhaps unwittingly started Lister on the path that would later lead to a degree from Queensland College of Art, a mentorship in New York with artist Max Gimblett and exhibitions in more than thirty group and solo shows around the world. Lister relocated to New York in 2006, where Anthem caught up with him via telephone from his Brooklyn studio.
When did you figure out that painting was something you could do as a career?
I never really figured it out. It just sort of happened. I’ve had jobs since I was 10 doing crazy shit—cleaning butcher’s holes and pushing trolleys, delivering pizzas, all these terrible things. But out of my group of friends, I was always “the guy that could draw.” And then somewhere along the line I started doing commissioned works. Since then, things have been going really well. I just want to keep painting and making sculptures and installing good shows and hopefully impact positively other artists. It’s really about the peers that are out there and the people who are doing good things at the moment—[the ones] that I like to pay attention to and I like to be paid attention by.
Your recent work with superheroes looks like Francis Bacon in collaboration with Warhol and Basquiat. What influences your art?
All of those artists right there have always been large inspirations for me, not that I keep them in mind at all when I paint. I just paint what I know about, what has influenced me throughout the years. I try not to be too intense about my depth of personality. I paint what I’d like to see.
I’ve come to a point where I don’t want to paint for anybody else but me. These [new works] fit into my own dealings with the world—with heroes and villains and mythology. It creates a large framework of subject matter for me to dive into. Painting is something that I really enjoy doing these days, and once my brushes are wet, it just becomes fun and easy, and I can’t pull myself away from it.
If you weren’t a painter, what would you be doing?
Probably delivering pizzas or murdering people. I don’t know. I couldn’t imagine my life without being able to make things that I fall in love with.
