Art from the Outskirts

copyright Jean Kallina Cotton 2001

Today, a special treat! One of your faithful blogger’s favorites of the modern painting pantheon: Will Cotton

Will cotton’s fanciful surrealist yet photorealistic approach to painting has won him praise from all over the art world. But it his is realism in imagination that truly makes Cotton one of a kind. It was the great fictional icon Willy Wonka who said we are the makers of dreams. Cotton is such a person by his own admittance in arguably the most sincere sense.

Nearly twenty year ago, just a few years after spending a some formative years studying in France and graduating from the Cooper Union university in New York with a traditional B.F.A. in 1987, and completing additional credentials at the New York Academy of Art, Cotton veered from the world’s path of least resistance and began tinkering with an idea he couldn’t resist - a candy-coated world of chocolate rivers, cookie cutter homes and M & M dreams! It is to be noted that “Candyland” conspicuously appears to be an exclusively lesbian colony though according to Cotton, it was not a conscious act to make it so.

Cotton described his evolution in a recent interview with fellow photorealist Adam Stennett:

“In the early nineties I made a group paintings using advertising icon characters. I felt like this was a cultural iconography I could understand, a set of universal symbols that we’d all grown up with. I made paintings of Mr. Bubble, the Hamburglar, Twinkie the Kid, and many others, and I found myself being drawn more and more toward anything specifically involving sweets. I was looking for a metaphor for pure indulgence, pure pleasure, something that only exists for enjoyment and nothing else. It was around this time that I came across the Candy Land board game I’d played as a child and I started to explore how a sweet landscape might take on the role of main character in the narrative” (Whitehot Magazine, 2008).

Cotton ’s most recent Painting Ribbon Candy was exhibited over the summer at the Mary Boone Gallery in New York.

Ribbon Candy 2008
Click the image for a larger view.

The Only Paradise is Paradise Lost 2007

Nut House 2007

Cotton Candy Clouds 2004

Chalet 2003

Ice Cream Cavern 2003

Chocolate Bath 2002

Chocolate Forest 2001


Peppermint Hideaway 2001

Devil’s Fudge Falls 1999

Sweet, sweet art from the Outskirts!

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