Will Cotton

Will Cotton
Born	1965 Melrose, Massachusetts
Nationality	United States
Education	B.F.A. 1987, Cooper Union, New York, NY; 1988, New York Academy of Art, New York, NY
Known for	Painting, Sculpture,
Awards	the Princess Grace Foundation award for contemporary art

Will Cotton (born 1965 in Melrose, Massachusetts, U.S.) is an American painter. His work primarily features landscapes composed of sweets, often inhabited by human subjects. Will Cotton lives and works in New York City.

Cotton's works from the 1990s depicted pop icons sourced from contemporary advertisements such as the Nestlé Quick bunny - directly referencing visual modes aimed at evoking desire. Cotton described his early works in a 2008 interview, saying "My initial impulse to make these paintings really came out of an awareness of the commercial consumer landscape that we live in. Every day we're bombarded with hundreds, if not thousands of messages designed specifically to incite desire within us."

In 1996, Cotton began to develop an iconography in which the landscape itself became an object of desire. The paintings often feature scenery made up entirely of pastries, candy and melting ice cream. He creates elaborate maquettes of these settings from real baked goods made in his Manhattan studio as a visual source for the final works. Since about 2002, nude or nearly nude pinup-style models have occasionally populated these candy-land scenes. As in the past, the works project a tactile indulgence in fanciful glut. The female characters are icons of indulgence and languor, reflecting the feel of the landscape itself. "These paintings are all about a very specific place," says Cotton, "It's a utopia where all desire is fulfilled all the time, meaning ultimately that there can be no desire, as there is no desire without lack."

Interested in cultural iconography, Cotton's art makes use of the common language of consumer culture shared across geographical boundaries. He considers the visual threads in his work, drawn from imagery ranging from the Candy Land board game and gingerbread houses to pinup art and cotton candy, to be part of the popular culture lexicon. Cotton’s work also builds upon and updates the idea of land of milk and honey in European literature and art. Cotton states “The dream of paradise, of a land of plenty, is a thread that runs through all of human history, not just in the affluent times but in fact very often in the lean as well.” He has also been inspired by painters Frederic Edwin Church, François Boucher and Fragonard, the photographer Carleton Watkins, as well as pin-up painters such as Gil Elvgren. Of his landscape painting influences, Cotton says,

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