Will Cotton (born 1965 in Melrose, Massachusetts, U.S.A.) is an American painter best known for his surreal landscapes made entirely of sweets, often populated by human figures. Cotton currently lives and works in New York City. In the 1990s, Cotton’s work focused on pop culture icons drawn from contemporary advertisements, such as the Nestlé Nesquik bunny. Reflecting on his early paintings in a 2008 interview, Cotton explained, “My initial impulse to make these paintings came from an awareness of the commercial consumer landscape we live in. Every day, we’re bombarded with hundreds, if not thousands, of messages designed specifically to stir desire within us.” By 1996, Cotton shifted his focus to creating landscapes where the scenery itself became an object of desire. His paintings began to feature environments constructed entirely from pastries, candy, and melting ice cream. To create these elaborate scenes, Cotton builds maquettes of edible materials in his Manhattan studio, using them as a visual reference for the final works. Around 2002, he began incorporating nude or nearly nude, pinup-style models into these candy-coated utopias. As Cotton notes, "These paintings are all about a very specific place—a utopia where all desire is fulfilled all the time. Ultimately, there can be no desire in such a place, because desire only exists in the absence of fulfillment."