ABOUT IRIS PRINTS

Iris printing (also referred to as Giclee printing) was "born" in September of 1987 at the "Lasers in Graphics" show in Miami where the Iris 3024 printer was introduced. Originally, the printer was developed as a pre-press proofing device. An early adopter of the technology for fine art printing was Graham Nash of the band Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, who, along with his road manager, Mac Holbert, used the printer to make editions of his photographs. In 1990, they established Nash Editions which remains one of the premier digital printmaking ateliers.

Until the early 21st century the Iris printer continued to be at the forefront of systems to produce artist's prints. While early Iris prints had a relatively fugitive light fastness and tended to show color changes after only a few years, later inksets, such as the Pinnacle Gold set from American Ink Jet Corporation, all but eliminated that weak point according to Henry Wilhelm. Wilhelm of Wilhelm Imaging Research, Inc., is the recognized authority on permanence testing and has rated Pinnacle Gold at 65-75 years on Somerset Velvet paper. One of the keys to the success of the Iris printer was its ability to create images with continuous ink stream broken into very small ink droplets of up to 32 different sizes. The result was an amazingly rich and intensely colored print that has all of the presence of a traditional non-digital print on a high quality watercolor paper. In fact, one of the strengths of the Iris was that it could print on virtually any surface that could be wrapped around its 48 inch diameter drum. At the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, we routinely used our Iris 3047G printer to print on a wide variety of watercolor, rice, and other handmade papers, as well as a wide range of textiles. Our Iris printer was retired in the summer of 2005.

Many of the most prominent artists of our time, including Robert Rauschenburg, Chuck Close, David Hockney, William Wegman, Harry Callahan, Joel Meyerowitz, and Lee Friedlander used the Iris printer to edition their work.