Paul Brooks Davis (a.k.a. Paul Davis, born 1938) is an American graphic artist.
Biography
Paul Brooks Davis, better known as Paul Davis, was born in 1938 in Centrahoma, Oklahoma. The middle of three children born to Howard Davis, a Methodist minister, and Susan Brookhart Davis, he spent his childhood in small towns: Caddo, Jenks, Hartshorne and Antlers, in Oklahoma, as well as Sulphur Springs, Arkansas; Ellis, Kansas; and, briefly, Great Falls, Montana. He attended Woodrow Wilson Junior High School (Tulsa, Oklahoma), and later, Will Rogers High School in Tulsa, where his talent was nurtured by his art teachers–Mr. Higgins in 8th grade, Ms. Ownby in 9th, and Hortense Bateholts at Will Rogers. While in high school, Davis, with friends Russell Myers and Archie Goodwin formed a cartoonist's club that met daily at the Owl Drugstore at 11th Street and Pittsburg in Tulsa. Davis won a scholarship at the age of 17 to the School of Visual Arts, still called the Cartoonists and Illustrators School, on a scholarship from Scholastic Arts Magazine and moved to New York. “It wasn’t very well known, but I had read about it in a comic book,” Davis said.[1] There, he studied with outstanding illustrators Philip Hays and Robert Weaver, and graphic designer and artist George Tscherny.
While in New York he had his first marriage in 1959 to aspiring actress-singer Elise Hepburn, which produced his son John. The divorced in 1964. He also married, former Push Pin colleague Myrna Mushkin, in 1965, and their son Matthew was born in 1967.
Career
While still a student, Davis produced his first commissioned illustration, a pencil drawing that appeared in the October 1959 issue of Playboy magazine. After finishing his courses at School of Visual Arts, he was hired by Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast, partners in the groundbreaking Push Pin Studios. A series of his target paintings was the subject of issue 32 (1961) of the studio's publication, The Push Pin Graphic.[2] He then illustrated "A Bestiary" of famous people, conceived and written by artist Edward Sorel, which appeared in the July 1962 issue of Horizon magazine.
In 1968, Davis was invited by Galerie Delpire in Paris, France, to have his first solo exhibition of paintings, and in 1977, Gilles deBure, curator of the Galerie d'Actualité in the Centre Georges Pompidou, presented a solo exhibition of Davis's work as part of the museum's opening festivities. Davis's distinctive paintings and posters for advertising, publishing and entertainment also have been the subject of museum and gallery exhibitions throughout Japan and Italy, and in cities around the U.S., including a retrospective in 1988 at the Philbrook Museum of Art in his native Tulsa, where then Governor Frank Keating declared the opening date of his exhibition the “Paul Davis Day.”