The name Will Cotton immediately brings to mind images of gorgeous nudes cavorting in fantasy landscapes made of sugarplums and candy canes. The painter’s current show at New York’s Pace Prints (through Nov. 16) is a case in point: it features prints of women wearing garments bedazzled with sweets and petit fours (in some cases hand-painted over lithographs), as well as crazily towering stacks of cakes built from pastel-colored paper pulp. In December, the French patissière Ladurée will introduce a limited-edition ginger whipped cream macaroon that Cotton dreamed up, housed in a box decorated with his painting of a woman wearing only whipped cream.  Given his penchant for whimsical flights of fancy, it’s surprising that Cotton feels a close kinship with the painter Steve Mumford, best known for elegant watercolor sketches made in combat zones in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mumford first traveled to Baghdad in 2003, soon after its fall, seeking to work in the long-dormant tradition of American war artists like Winslow Homer. His dispatches were posted on Artnet.com and published in the 2005 book “Baghdad Journal” (Drawn & Quarterly). More recently, Mumford has been visiting Guantanamo Bay, where he covered the military trial of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who was accused of helping plan the USS Cole attack, for the October issue of Harper’s. More of Mumford’s powerful Gitmo sketches — of interrogation huts and cell blocks, all eerily devoid of prisoners — can be seen in “The Snow Leopard” (through Nov. 23) at New York’s Postmasters Gallery.  “One of the nicest experiences an artist can have in New York is to find other like-minded people. For me that has meant finding people who are interested in drawing and painting at a time when a lot of the art world is not. In 2002 I started getting this group together in my studio to draw from life. Steve has been there since the beginning. When I first got to know him he was doing pictures of the Vietnam War, of what he imagined the experience was like. Then he decided to go to Iraq, to insert himself into a real situation. That really got my attention. It seemed so fearless, both on an artistic level and on the potential-for-bodily-harm level.  “His work changed as a result. Mostly, he honed his skill at capturing the moment in a way you don’t ever have to do if you’re making set-up scenes in the studio. If you’re in a war zone, you have to actually be fast and skilled. And when you put yourself directly in front of a very complex subject, you wind up with a record that’s equally complex. When you’re making a painting, every brush stroke is a decision to include or omit information that you see in front of you. Let’s say he’s looking at a pink cloud against a gray sky. There are a million ways to describe it, and the way he chooses to describe it will make a different picture. Then there are wonderful things like the rainbows you get in a couple of these paintings. If you were abstractly describing prison camp, you would never put a rainbow in the picture. It’s the kind of thing you would only do if you were actually at this prison camp, experiencing this thing in all its complexity.  “Another thing that really hit me is how Steve went down there expecting to draw the prisoners and then was denied all access, so he drew everything around them. He was able to convey their presence via total human absence. They are absolutely haunting drawings about the potency of negative space.”
Though their subjects couldn&#8217;t be more different &#8212; Cotton paints candy-colored dreamscapes, Mumford, war zones &#8212; the two men have long had a close kinship.