Artist Will Cotton, famous for his hyper-realism cotton candy oil paintings, and the art director of Katy's California Gurls, as well as the man who painted the cover for Teenage Dream, recently opened up about his experience with her:
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You were behind both Perry’s Teenage Dream album artwork and her video for "California Gurls," for which you served as the artistic director. Why did you paint Cupcake Katy?
When Katy came to pose for me for the album cover, she spent a whole day in my studio. I wound up taking lots of
photographs and making some sketches. And so this portrait was not made for any specific purpose at all, other than
it was an image I just really wanted to paint. It was not a commission.
Working with her was really a new experience for me. Before she came along, I had no interest in painting a
recognizable person. But Katy had this kind of pop culture iconography that just seemed to me to fit into the kind of
things I was already interested in painting about particularly her posing for this picture. It was a painting I’d wanted to make for a long time with the right person, and she was the right person for it.
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In your work, you use candy to explore themes like temptation, indulgence and perfection. Since you rarely paint celebrities, what about Katy made you want to explore those particular messages with her?
That’s a great question. It’s funny, because her image has now gotten very wrapped up in the project we did together.I’m realizing it’s hard to put my finger on and describe exactly what it was. I mean, the pictures I’d seen of her [back then], she had more of a fruit thing going on; she had these really outrageous, wonderful costumes.
I loved the way she wore them. She’s so fully transformative, and just like an actress, she’d put herself into a different role. And there was this willingness to not take herself too seriously that felt right. There was this positivity to her presence. It’s also her music. The first time I heard it, it just struck me as the best kind of pop; pure fun, with a message that’s heartfelt, true, but not necessarily self conscious.
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He then elaborates more on how Katy was someone he had always wanted to paint, and how she is impactful on pop culture.
http://www.willcotton.com/uploads/pd...mithsonian.pdf
His other paintings: