Digital Printmaking Takes Another Leap Forward
Joan Pabst Dubanoski's Digital
Prints Chosen for 1,480-Room Hotel
The News Item
World Printmakers digital printmaker, Joan Pabst Dubanoski,
has been chosen by Starwood Hotels to provide the artwork for the major
renovation of the 1,480 rooms of their Sheraton Waikiki Hotel on
Waikiki Beach in Honolulu, Hawaii. Dubanoski's digital prints feature
abstract images of local flora and are printed on archival watercolor
paper using pigment-based inks by master printer, Stefan Meinl. Different
room-design themes and images were chosen for the ocean-view and mountain/city-view
rooms, respectively. The renovation, designed by Honolulu-based architectural
and interior-design firm Peter Vincent & Associates, began
early in 2005 and will continue through fall 2007. Presently four floors
are completed and ready for visitor occupancy.
The Implications
- Notice to Non-Believers
Not since Dot Krause's major commission a few years ago for the Boston
Federal Reserve Bank have we seen a digital artist entrusted with
a job of such magnitude, and Joan Dubanoski is to be heartily congratulated.
From here, her prints, glamorous colorful abstracted images of native
Hawaiian plants and flowers, look like design made in Heaven for a big,
colorful hotel on Waikiki Beach. High-profile commissions like this one
open the way for other digital imagemakers from all over the world, legitimizing,
as it were, this new medium for business clients, collectors and galleries.
This commission sends a clear message to all of these groups, particularly
the many art galleries which still refuse to hang digital art on their
walls alleging that it's 'computer generated:' Digital art is here in
a big way, and it's here to stay.
If there has been one constant throughout the history of art, that constant is change. There have always been retrograde elements which have used one pretext or another to resist that change. In the end, however, the resistence has always given way to the inexhorable new realities imposed by innovative artists using new tools, by the market and by the evolving tastes of art lovers. Digital art is no different, and its time has come. And, like digital everything else, it has come along far faster than most people expected. The following paragraph was written by a supposedly-well-informed observer just over a year ago:
"You may have a great product for which the market is not yet ready. This is the situation in which digital printmaking finds itself currently, I suspect. There are digital artists out there with loads of creative talent and a prodigious command of the tools and the language of digital art, and they deserve to be successful. But right now, and for some time to come, the market is fickle and immature where digital prints are concerned."
That "supposedly-well-informed observer" was me, and that observation was published on the World Printmakers website in February, 2004 in a two-part article entitled, 'Aspiration: Working Artist.' Though I'm chagrined to have been so short sighted, I'm delighted to be proven wrong by an artist like Joan Dubanoski. What is Joan Pabst Dubanoski like, anyway? Where is she coming from? How did she manage to win the Sheraton commission? How did she cope with the logistics of producing 3,500 prints? To find out the answers to all these questions, and more, have a look at Bart Sedgebear's interview with the artist herself, which we have entitled, 'A Chat with the Renaissance Digital Printmaker.'
