Will Cotton
Will Cotton is a New York City based draughtsman and painter, internationally known for his ability to expertly render life like scenes of sugary wonderlands filled with sensual figures and cotton candy clouds. Cotton blends rococo excess with pinups in a fairy tale package. Working from life, Cotton creates all of the fantastical confectionary costumes and scenes in his studio, staging and lighting them as scale models. Cotton's world inspired the pop singer Katy Perry's California Gurls, music video, building a lasting relationship and body of work with the singer serving as a model for the artist. One of Cotton's portraits of Perry is in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC.
Cotton has been making prints for more than a decade, focused primarily on lithography as his medium of choice. Cotton once remarked "When I was first approached about doing a stone lithograph, I thought why would I want to work with that antiquated process in the modern era. Then I tried it and realized that it was no more antiquated than a pencil and required more precision in terms of draughtsmanship than any other medium I worked. I've been hooked ever since." Cotton began making prints with master printer Phil Sanders in 2015, opening the door to multicolor lithography. The two have collaborated on six different editions, the first of which, Differed Promise, was the impetus for Cotton's solo exhibition at the Orlando Museum of Art in 2017.
Cotton received a BFA fro the Cooper Union in New York City and an honorary Doctorate from the New York Academy of Art. Cotton has works in the collections of the Orlando Museum of Art, Columbus Museum of Art, Seattle Museum of art, among others in addition to the many prominent commissions including Martha Stewart. Cotton was featured for the 2013 cover and 23 page spread of New York Magazine's spring fashion issue with Elle Fanning serving as his model. Cotton is featured in the publication Prints and Their Makers, by Princeton Architectural Press and is also the subject of a monograph published by Rizzoli.
