Will Cotton on the creation of the ARTnews Summer 2015 cover

Visiting Will Cotton’s lower Manhattan studio, you can never predict what you’ll find… from his famous painting of Katy Perry floating on a cotton-candy cloud to a new work inspired by a mid-19th-century utopian community on Long Island to–big surprise — large lithographs.

“Just drawing on litho stones is kind of a dying art,” Cotton says. “I’ve always been fascinated by the mixture of image and type.”

“I realized that instead of being imitative of painting or drawing, it is its own thing; it is just this absolutely gorgeous, wonderful work.”

This kind of dedication to the medium made Cotton the perfect artist to grace the cover of ARTnews’s July/August issue, the 25th anniversary of our authoritative “World’s Top 200 Collectors” feature, for which he has made a special limited edition lithograph.