✿ Will COTTON ✿

'Se ti raggiungerò un giorno
sarà il destino a condurmi lì
E non è solo un sogno credimi
i miei silenzi ti accarezzano già...'

~ Catherine La Rose©2013 ~
tratto da un'inedita "tra cielo e terra"

Will Cotton (b. 1965) earned his B.F.A. in 1987 from Cooper Union, New York, NY. He has also studied at the New York Academy of Art (which specializes in figurative art) and at Beaux Arts, Rouen, France. He lives in New York City.
Cotton's early works from the depicted pop icons drawn from contemporary advertisements such as the Nestlé Quick bunny - directly referencing visual modes aimed at evoking desire. Among Cotton's early influences were many landscape painters, especially such early American painters as Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church, and the painters of the Hudson River Valley School. In Cotton's landscape paintings he sought to merge his interest in popular icons and the element of desire in order to update the idea of America as the "land of milk and honey." He observed that many of the early American landscape paintings were initially created specifically with a sort of propagandist intention to "incite a feeling of awe and a desire to experience the new frontier. 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.”
His first mature works focus largely upon a merger of the landscape with elements of the fantastic drawn from consumer products and fantasies, advertisements, the classic child's game Candyland, cotton candy, and gingerbread houses. 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.