David Coons

Keith Goldfarb, co-founder of Rhythm and Hues Studios, a computer-graphics studio that works on major motion pictures—Night at the Museum 2: Battle of the Smithsonian and The Chronicles of Riddick (2004),—as well as high-end commercials, has called him "the most knowledgeable person about scanning on this planet."

Active in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Coons works behind the scenes in the film and computer graphics industries. He is also the president and owner of ArtScans Studio in Culver City, California, where he uses a scanner of his own invention to serve a clientele of celebrity artists and fine artists. The ArtScans page describes the scanner this way: "ArtScans has been doing accurate color capture for reproduction since 1992. We own and operate a large (44" x 50") flatbed scanner that is the only one of its kind in the world. Both the scanner and its software were designed by us."

In the mid-1990s, Coons split off from Nash Editions to concentrate on scanning, while Nash's team continued to work on fine art printing. The two companies still share a close relationship, and refer clients to one another.

David Coons was also a pioneer in the art of digital printing reproduction of scanned and computer generated artwork, specifically adapting the large format IRIS printer, a machine designed to work solely with proprietary prepress computer systems, to this task. In the late 1980s Coons developed software to use an IRIS 3024 at The Walt Disney Company to print images from Disney's new Computer Animation Production System. He also wrote software to print works created on desktop computers such as Sally Larsen 1989 Transformer series and a 1990 photography exhibition for Graham Nash of Crosby, Stills, and Nash. The work he did for Nash had to do with re-creating images for prints and negatives had been lost by scanning the remaining contact prints at high resolution, and printing them in extremely large format.

David B. Coons was born in 1960, and grew up in Santa Monica, California. He attended Santa Monica High School while living in a highly unconventional family arrangement: he alternated between his uncle's apartment (where he actually had a bedroom) and his father's apartment (which was his sister's official residence), several blocks away. During his high school years he was a member of the "Olive Starlight Orchestra" (not an orchestra at all, but rather a social circle akin to Virginia Woolf's Bloomsbury Group), that included film editor Kate Sanford, doctor David Eadington, graphics developers Eric Enderton and Greg Turk, writer Sandra Tsing Loh, lawyer Susan P. Crawford, and entrepreneur Christophe Pettus (founder of the company Blowfish). His did some work on films including a vampire movie entitled Murder in Vein and a short called The Juggler, which starred Keith Goldfarb.