Rough Draft: Joshua Davis

Joshua Davis, known for creating a new type of art called generative-art known dynamic abstraction, started out in Littleton, Colorado. He was always interested in art, but didn't really do much with it while in school.
At the end of 1992, he moved to New York and eventually attended Pratt Institute where he worked on Design and Illustration. His classmates got him into working on the web in 1995 using Netscape 1.1, but didn't get serious about it until Netscape 2 came out in early 1996. By the end of 1996, when Netscape 3 came out, he was already teaching himself HTML, Javascript, PERL, DHTML and CSS.
Also while in Pratt, he played around early versions of Flash including Futuresplash, the program that came before Flash. However, it wasn't until Macromedia came out with Flash 4, which introduced ActionScript, that Davis really got into the program.


Using his skills of a programmer, he uses a combination of Illustrator and ActionScript in Flash to create pieces of art that Davis has described to be "Beautiful Accidents." First, he creates vector images in Illustrator and imports them into Flash, making them objects. Then, using code, he writes a program that picks random combinations of vectors from parameters set by Davis. The number of vectors, colors, and parameters are endless, and therefore, so are the combinations that Flash creates.
These "Accidents" have produced many pieces of art, including two websites: Once Upon a Forest and Praystation. Davis also has many clients, including companies such as BMW and Motorola, and musical artists such as Kanye West and MingDynasty. He has recently collaborated with Miquelrius, a stationary company, to produce notebooks featuring his illustrations on the covers.
Both Once Upon a Forest and PrayStation were websites put up by Davis to showcase his art. Once Upon a Forest features twenty-three different pictures to be scrolled by clicking on an arrow. All of these spectacular images capture your imagination and interest with different designs, patterns, and colors. Most of the images consist of one or two colors and their variations. PrayStation, on the other hand, has at least three different versions on the Internet, all of which have news, updates, and projects from Davis.

Davis usually relates his concepts with those of Jackson Pollock's. Pollock was a 20th century painter, who changed what the world thought about painting by using different techniques, such as splashing paint onto a canvas that was nailed to the floor. Davis said that "I’m [not] a particular fan of his visual style, but because he always identified himself as a painter, even though a lot of the time his brush never hit the canvas. There’s something in that disconnect - not using a brush or tool in traditional methods." This is similar to how Davis works, because he doesn't necessarily draw all his works, but instead uses Flash to generate the pieces of work and works with those generations until he gets an image he likes.