The Arteur

Interested in cultural iconography, Will Cotton 's art makes use of the common language of consumer culture shared across geographical boundaries. He considers the visual threads in his work, drawn from imagery ranging from the Candy Land board game and gingerbread houses to pinup art and cotton candy, to be part of the popular culture lexicon.[2] Cotton’s work also builds upon and updates the idea of land of milk and honey in European literature and art. Cotton states “The dream of paradise, of a land of plenty, is a thread that runs through all of human history, not just in the affluent times but in fact very often in the lean as well.”[4] He has also been inspired by painters Frederic Edwin Church, François Boucher, and Fragonard, the photographer Carleton Watkins, as well as pin-up painters such as Gil Elvgren. Of his landscape painting influences, Cotton says, "I was initially drawn to the Hudson River School when I learned that many of the paintings were made specificall...

Helena Sofia (Helene) Schjerfbeck was a Finnish modernist painter known for her realist works and self-portraits, and also for her landscapes and still lifes. Throughout her long life her work changed dramatically, beginning with French-influenced realism and plein air painting. It gradually evolved towards portraits and still life paintings.  At the beginning of her career she often produced historical paintings, such as the Wounded Warrior in the Snow (1880), At the Door of Linköping Jail in 1600 (1882) and The Death of Wilhelm von Schwerin (1886). Historical paintings were usually the realm of male painters, as was experimentation with modern influences and French radical naturalism, and her works from mostly the 1880s did not receive a favorable reception until later in her life. Her work starts with a dazzlingly skilled, somewhat melancholic version of late-19th-century academic realism.... It ends with distilled, nearly abstract images in which pure paint and cryptic descript...