Jeff Davis is a generative artist and Chief Creative Officer at Art Blocks whose minimalist, code-based compositions are built from whole-number ratios, arithmetic sequences and color theory. He trained as a painter and printmaker at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and published textbooks on design and color theory before releasing generative editions on SuperRare, Rarible and, in late 2020, Art Blocks.
In the 1990s Davis developed hard-edged geometric compositions digitally before executing them as paintings, silkscreens and collages, and after discovering Processing around 2010 he began using code, rather than the Excel spreadsheets he had relied on earlier, to generate the compositions himself. He cites Sol LeWitt's Incomplete Open Cubes and Josef Albers's color theory as influences, and favors whole-number ratios and integer sequences over noise functions, keeping his algorithmic spaces deliberately narrow.He has published two textbooks, Foundations of Color (2015) and Foundations of Design (2016),and in 2025 the retrospective book Color: 1995–2025 accompanied an exhibition at Artverse in Paris surveying three decades of his work from painting and printmaking to digital and algorithmic pieces centered on color theory.
Davis is Chief Creative Officer at Art Blocks, working with generative artists to help realize their projects,and was one of three artists, alongside Erick Calderon (Snowfro) and Daniel Calderon Arenas, who launched the platform on November 27, 2020.His Construction Token was one of that day's three inaugural Curated releases, alongside Snowfro's Chromie Squiggle and Calderon Arenas's Genesis.,When Bright Moments founder Seth Goldstein opened a gallery in Venice Beach in spring 2021, ten of Davis's Portal works were generated in advance and sold on OpenSea as the gallery's first showcase,sparking the idea for its CryptoCitizens collection.,
His largest project, Color Study (2021), comprises 2,000 outputs, though Davis has said he is drawn to smaller, tightly bounded systems.In 2022 his tribute Rectangles (for Herbert), made for the computer artist Herbert W. Franke, was the top seller by trading volume among the roughly 5,000 pieces created for Franke's tribute, with a floor of 0.12 ETH and a total volume of 80 ETH.,In 2025 he released Progression as a fundraiser marking the launch of the Generative Art Foundation, and made Drawings for a Monument as a chromatic tribute to every Art Blocks Curated release for Art Blocks' 500th-release milestone, AB500.He has shown a solo exhibition at Office Impart in Berlinand gave a talk called After the Algorithm at the NFC Summit in Lisbon.
