One artist that particularly stuck out to me from our studio visit readings was Will Cotton. He is based out of New York City and is known for his paintings featuring landscapes composed of sweets that are often accompanied by human subjects, but he has also worked in drawing, sculpture, performance art, and even directing Katy Perry’s “California Girls” music video.
His most notable work began in the 1990s, when he formed the idea to take influence from contemporary advertisements and use pop icons within his paintings. His goal for his work was to evoke a sense of desire in the viewer. He cited his draw to this idea as being sparked by his awareness of the commercial consumer world that we live in, constantly being bombarded with countless messages aiming to bring out that same desire. These landscape scenes made up entirely of baked goods, candy, and ice cream and often accompanied by beautiful nude women act as a projection for indulgence and gluttony.
Cotton’s process for creating these paintings has somewhat evolved over the years, yet his general process remains for the most part constant. He begins the process by creating real 3D scenes of buildings and landscapes out of actual baked goods in his studio, and he then uses these scenes as a visual source for his paintings. In his interview, he stated that at first he would paint directly from these sculptures as they sat in his studio, but eventually he began instead photographing the scenes in order to give himself more time to work.
Will Cotton’s work is particularly interesting to me for multiple reasons. First of all, he has very much zeroed in on his “thing”. I feel as though it is an important aspect for many successful artists to maintain a certain conceptual theme throughout their work. This is something I have struggled with, as yes, I have somewhat of a technical theme in my work, but there has never been a subject or idea that I have been drawn to pursue. I admire those artists who have discovered their voice and what message they want to send through their work, and are able to actively pursue it in all their work.
Cotton also is fascinating to me because of how contradictory his work is. The subject matter and execution are so beautifully paradoxical, with such a surreal subject matter being painted in such an exact, photorealistic way. Similarly to my last blog focus, Kehinde Wiley, he is full of contradictions. His figures and landscapes are rendered photorealistically, yet the scenes consist of impossible situations and landscapes. This goes beyond simply the subject matter and into the color schemes. This contradiction between the surreal colors and subjects and the photorealistic execution creates a feeling of unease within the viewer, as their eye is seeing one thing but their mind is interpreting another. And what is even more fascinating is that in his studio interview he admitted to only using 5 colors for all of his paintings. This is incredible when you see the rich range in color within each work.
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