The Academy Blog

Coconut Cake, 2013

Will Cotton stands before a medium sized canvas, blank but for a few brown marks he’s laid in for measurements. He lazily wipes his paintbrush on his apron, which was once white but is now splattered with brown and red paint. “This is my rag,” he tells us. His voice is clear and his manner relaxed, and although it’s Saturday morning, students hang on his every word. The apron, plus his thick-framed glasses and leather combat boots, lend Will a hipster-butcher look.
But Will is more of a baker than a butcher. He has created a world of dream-like, candy-confection-landscapes, often inhabited by human subjects, and is best known for his highly rendered oil paintings. However, his world extends far beyond the canvas. Over three weekends in November of 2009, he installed a pop-up French bakery/art installation at Partners & Spade, where he baked and sold confections that often serve as visual reference for his paintings. In 2010, he directed Katy Perry’s “California Gurls” music video, (again based around imagery from his paintings, which Perry was attracted to). In 2011, Will created “Cockaigne,” a scrumptious-smelling performance piece employing both ballet and burlesque to celebrate whipped cream and cotton candy.
Initially, Will strove to make art that came out of an awareness of the commercial consumer landscape we live in. He studied at the Academy in the late eighties, (when it was still on Lafayette Street), and after graduating began to develop a language in which the landscape itself – filled with candies and cakes – became the object of desire. In the early 2000s, nude or nearly nude figures began to populate these scenes. “These paintings are all about a very specific place,” he says. “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.”

Will in his Studio

Will’s Palette: (All Old Holland brand)
-Titanium White – for opacity and strength (usually for highlights) 
-Magenta – (Quinecridone) – Will likes it for its coolness and vibrancy
-Cadmium Orange – With this and Magenta, you can mix any red you like
-Cadmium Yellow Light
-Delft Blue – this is a “middle” blue, so you can take it anywhere you want (ie towards green or towards purple). Will hates phthalos (monster-weed colors, far too strong), and ultramarine is too purple
-Ivory black –Will mostly uses the black for background, to represent a kind of dead zone or nothingness. Also, black and yellow make much more natural greens than blue and yellow

The Deferred Promise of Complete Satisfaction, 2014

Many of us were surprised by the lack of earth colors (oxides, umbers, ochres) in Will’s palette, because his paintings contain a lot of browns and flesh tones. “I use oranges, blues, and whites to create my browns,” he explains.
Will spends a lot of time looking at the subtle differences in color across surfaces of skin. “Light on flesh tends to get cooler and greener,” he says, “so I often go for yellow and blue when going for light in the flesh.”
Perhaps the most important formula any Academy painting student will learn during their two years is this: when the light mass is warm, the shadow mass is cool, and vice versa. However, what really makes a painting “sing” is the subtle temperature differences in “reflected light,” within the shadow mass.
“I love reflected light. It’s just my favourite thing… What happens in between light and shadow – that’s what’s really interesting, what pays off – it’s more important than the color of the light mass,” he says. “See how this shadow color changes from blue to orange on the breast?” Considering how well-rendered Will’s paintings are, what surprised me most about him was his aggressive facture. “The great thing about doing an under-painting is that it preserves the drawing,” he says. With the drawing intact, he can absolutely attack the canvas when he introduces color. “I just put paint on and move it around until it looks right. I’m also not shy at all about taking it OFF.” He takes 3-inch wide bristle brush and pulls paint across the whole form. “I’m not a big believer in the sanctity of the mark,” he says, slashing through the paint he’s put down. He steps back to assess, and then lunges at the painting again, like a fencer. “You may mess it up by doing this, but it creates complexity. If you just blend along the line you get tubes and sausages. If you do it with a big brush, you get weird little skin-like things happening.”
Many times during my second year at the Academy I’ve been reminded to “cover my tracks” – that is, not let my viewer see how I’ve made a painting. A painting can lose some of its magic if the viewer can say “Here’s exactly how I would make that” and imagine themselves recreating the work. It was a treat to get an inside look at Will’s process, and to see just how he goes from blank canvas to his highly realized, dreamlike candy land. Will Cotton is a baker, a painter, and in this respect, a true magician.