WILL COTTON "CHOCOLATE WAVE" 2002, OIL ON LINEN, 71" x 79"
tema celeste, november-december 2002.
self-portrait
SWEETS
In 1996 I built a mountain of cakes in my studio. In the end,
it was over six feet tall with a big gingerbread house on top.
I added forests of lollipops and candy canes, gumdrop retaining
walls, even a small chocolate stream. As I sat and stared at my
creation and made drawings and photographs, I realized I was in
Candy Land, that I could completely give myself over to the sensation
that I was sitting in front of a strange new landscape. I felt
like an explorer looking at the Grand Canyon for the first time.
I had painted landscapes in the past, but always from nature.
Suddenly I saw a way to create an entirely new reality. With sweets
as the fabric of this new universe, I found that I could now make
references within the landscape genre to the issues of temptation,
indulgence, and excess that had long been part of my work.
MAQUETTES
When I start a new painting now, I always begin with a sketch
and a shopping list. I recently made a root beer waterfall in
my studio that required four gallons of ice cream, fifteen gallons
of root beer and twenty industrial size sheet cakes. A fiberglass
undercarriage, fitted with two powerful pumps, was required to
constantly circulate the root beer from the lower basin to the
top of the waterfall. In the end, the model only worked for about
thirty minutes before it disintegrated into a gooey mass of cake
and melted ice cream. Knowing this would be the case, I shot digital
video footage of the whole operation which I later referred to
while making the painting.
PAINT
Even though my process involves drawing, model making, and photography,
the final product is still oil on canvas. Paint still has the
greatest potential for creative expression. It has a physical
presence and an ability to record even the slightest gesture of
the hand. I often work from photographs but my work isn't photorealist.
Although I find photography to be very useful as a reference for
painting, I'm not interested in reproducing the look of a photograph.
I do however, want my pictures to look very real, to look so convincing
that the viewer can be won over by the artifice and believe they
have seen a new real place.
FIGURES
This past summer I began putting people in my candy landscapes.
I see the figures both as inhabitants of the place and as objects
of desire themselves, just like the candy and cake that surrounds
them. This meant building much larger studio mock-ups, in which
the models would be in scale with their surroundings. For a piece
called Sugar Beach, I covered my studio floor with over 200 pounds
of sugar. I asked the three girls posing for me to eat a lot of
sugar, to look both sated and slightly nauseated. I was painting
in France at the time, near a town where the local baker made
huge meringues, at least twelve inches across. I spread these
around the scene to function more or less like rocks or shells.
I'm planning a piece now which involves several figures posed
in an ice cream landscape but I've got to wait a couple of months
until the studio will be cold enough to build the set.
WILL COTTON
Source: Will Cotton, Self- Portrait, Tema Celeste, November - December 2002, pp. 70-71.