Have you guys ever seen the music video for Katy Perry’s California Gurls? It features a candy wonderland with cotton candy clouds and chocolate rivers. If you watch the whole video, you can see that it is very artistically done. The various creatures and buildings that are shown in the video, such as the candy cane snakes, are very creative ideas:
While listening to the song on the T.V. on day, I watched a behind-the-scenes shows about the video and found out that it was based on the artwork of Will Cotton, an American painter that now lives in New York City. His work mainly features landscapes composed of sweets that are often inhabited by humans.
His work is largely influenced by pop culture and advertisement icons, such as the Candy Land board game or the Nestle Bunny. When Katy Perry came across his work, she approached him and asked if she could use his ideas. Cotton then created original props for the set, that you will see in the video. He is also the designer for her album cover.
I chose to blog about this because I feel like the art world and the technological/ pop culture world are becoming more closely related. I think this is because artist know what interests the majority of today’s youth. That’s why on Youtube, we continuously see artists covering popular songs in order to get more views. It’s interesting to see how the art world has evolved.
Here’s some images of Cotton’s Work:
Just another lovely expression of the power of sex and women. Did you notice the reference in one of the last of Snoop’s lines: “I wish they all could be California Girls?” This is a sentiment that dates back to the early 1960’s and the 1965 song of the same name by the Beach Boys. Of course, the 1965 rendition is quaint in the extreme compared with the California Gurls:
This YouTube combines images of Marilyn Monroe, the sex goddess of the time. (And, of course, art history has no shortage of beautiful images of the human body.) The Beach Boys convey the very same ideas of the power of sun, sand and beautiful scantily clad female bodies in their song, but the images are far more “G” rated. It is better that we are more “open” now, or is there something lost?
I always thought that that video was just random and Katy Perry being weird honestly. Now that I know it was based off of actual artwork, I find it a lot more interesting. As for Cotton’s work, his paintings are great- they could be mistaken for actual pictures at first glance.