Print Exhibit Showcases work of Artists at Denver's Open Press
The Gazette, Colorado Springs
August 13, 2004
by Mark Arnest

"Open Press, at 15 Year Retrospective" is the largest show every at the Gallery of Contemporary Art - at least by square footage.

I've have more pieces in a show, but lots of them were tchotchkes," says curator Gerry Riggs. "Lots of these are huge."

The exhibit showcases Denver's Open Press, the printing studio that opened in December, 1988.

Since then, founder Mark Lunning has helped hundreds of artists create prints - a catch-all term for any technique in which an artist creates a piece on one surface (such as stone or copper) and then transfers the image to another surface, usually paper. (mass-produced prints, even when signed and numbered by the artist, are more properly termed "reproductions.")

This exhibit feature some 200 pieces by 30 of them. "These are active artists at Open Press," says Lunning. "This is the core group plus a couple of newer people."

Lunning is both artist and master of the bewildering range of printing techniques, which he outlines for interested parties on a 24-box flowchart. "I like to make art, and I like to help other people make art," he says.

Lunning's specialized knowledge and well-equipped facility - which includes a 44-by-84-inch intaglio press that gave birth to many of these huge works - enables Open Press to fulfill an important artistic niche. It and Shark's Ink in Lyons are the only fine art presses in the state not affiliated with a college or university.

Lunning also has an outgoing, empathic personality that enables him to get along with the many artists who come through Open Press' doors.

"Some artists want to stay focused on the creative process," says Lunning. "They don't want to worry about adjusting the press, or how long to leave the acid on the plate."

At the other extreme is an artist such as Joe Higgins, whose massive "Man with Torch" is one of the show's most striking works. "When he first came to Open Press 14 years ago, I helped him a little," says Lunning. "Now he comes in and works on his own."

The range of styles justifies the exhibit's size. Lynn Heitler's massive screen is a Baroque jumble of layered images that would take hours to view attentively; Reed Weimer's prints are straight black-on-white miniatures that reveal their musical rhythms at first glance. There's everything from Ken Elliott's Impressionistic sunsets to Dave Yust's amorphous abstractions.

Mark A. Lunning and Open Press
303 Magazine, August 2004
by John Barnes

A mission, an obsession, a passion? Whatever it is that Mark Lunning has, it's contagious. Like many people who walk into the Open Press Gallery at 40 West Bayaud Avenue, I had thought that "fine art prints" were reproductions, like the Monet or Van Gogh posters that go onto the dorm walls of brainy college students.

Lunning encounters this often. "A print is not a copy," he says firmly. Fine art prints are fine art in which pigment, dye, or ink is applied by, on, or through one or more plates. Typically there is no original; the artist works on the plate itself, and the only finished work is the print.

"But I get art collectors in here who have collected for years who see a print they like and want to 'buy the original'," Lunning says, shaking his head in disbelief. "There are people, professionals in the art world, who don't know that difference between a handmade print and a reproduction."

Editions of a fine art print will number between five and fifty copies, with ten or twenty being typical. "Most artists really enjoy making the plate, and once there are a few impressions, they destroy the plate because they're done with it - they've gotten what they want and there's no point in just running off copies."

For non-artists, collecting hand-made prints is an economical way of building a personal art collection. Fine art prints can be as little as $25; many excellent prints cost less than $100. If you stay with it, your acquisitions can pace your income - at the high end, the prices for fine art prints overlap original paintings, and command prices in the low thousands (prints by recognized, dead masters go much higher). If you have a wall and an eye, you can begin the core of a serious art collection today, and take it as far as you want or can afford.

At the opening of Open Press's "Bird Show," a collection by more than thirty local artists, my overwhelming lesson was that hand-printing embraces a diversity of technique as wide as painting or sculpture. Lithographs, engravings, woodcuts, etchings, intaglios, monoprints - as different from each other as watercolor is from oil or as pointillism from pen-and-ink - thronged the walls; so much to see, so many new things to appreciate.

I overheard, three times, people wondering what it would cost to "buy the original." They still think of printing as some kind of super-Xerox.

But the truth is right there. The gallery opens directly into the vast workroom where Lunning, and dozens of other Denver artists, have been hand-making prints for fifteen years now. The big tables and the immense array of tools are tidied up when the gallery is open (Noon to 5 p.m. every Friday and Saturday, 6-9 p.m. for First Friday Art Walks) but even among a nicely dressed crowd sipping wine and gazing at the prints, you know that the workroom is the real heart of Open Press.

"I make art and I help other people make art," Lunning says, summarizing a life. His blue eyes sparkle with intensity and he gestures as if conducting a speeded-up orchestra. The day I talk to him, he is in an ink stained apron, jeans, flannel shirt, and red bandanna, fresh from his work.

Lunning began Open Press because "when people get out of art school, they still want to make prints but they find they can't do it without the toys." He asked around, found that many of his fellow artists wanted a print facility that they could rent as needed, and Open Press was born, swiftly growing into a more-than-fulltime job.

Mark Lunning has been at the forefront not just of printmaking, but of the promotion of fine art prints: he teaches at the League of Art Students, he is a co-founder of the Denver Print Collectors' Club, and he will soon begin offering printmaking classes for amateurs who want to try a new handicraft. If there is a way to hook an art enthusiast - practitioner, spectator, dabbler, or collector - on prints, he'll do it.

It has certainly worked on me. Beginning August 13 at the Gallery of Contemporary Art on the CU Colorado Springs campus, there will be a retrospective of fifteen years of Open Press. I'll be there; I wouldn't miss it. Neither should you. As said, Mark Lunning is contagious.