Latest Warren MacKenzie Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• Here is this ability to explore ideas, but with minute changes, and then look at the results. Often you get so excited about what you're doing that you think, "Oh, wow, this is just great." And you look at it a week later and you realize you'd been excited by the act of creation, but what you've created is not really exciting when you look at it in cold blood. And so that, to me, is a valuable lesson also.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Thinking, Ideas, Blood

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• Every pot is not going to be a masterpiece.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Pot, Masterpiece

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• Things happen very quickly and they have to happen quickly in order to have vitality, which I think is essentially part of a good pot. But in addition it means that you can explore an idea and change it and then change it and then change it; I don't mean by changing the one pot, but you make one pot then you make another that's related to that; you make another - you can make 50 pots in a day and none of them are going to be carbon copies of any other, but they'll all be related because there's something going through your mind about the form on that particular day.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Mean, Thinking, Order

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• Since your time is your main involvement here - I mean, the clay doesn't cost very much. Even the glaze and the firing doesn't cost a great deal. But your time is the cost, and if you can keep your time to a minimum and still come out with the results you want, that means the pots can be sold for an economic price.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Mean, Clay, Cost

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• I'm striving to make things which are the most exciting things I can make that will fit in people's homes. And in that respect, working on the wheel is economically about the only answer I know, because one can, as Leach said, make 50 pots in a day. You can make 100 pots in a day. A really good potter can make 400 pots in a day.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Home, People, Wheels

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• If you press-mold a pot or if you slab-build a pot, the work has got to take much, much, much longer than if you work on the wheel. And I to this day have the ideal that I want my work to be not too expensive, so that if people buy it and break it, it's not going to be the end of the world. I'm not interested in having things in museums, although some of our work has ended up there, but that's not what I'm striving for.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Museums, People, Want

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• In the Leach Pottery we did most of our work on the wheel. [Bernard] Leach did a little work in the studio, which was press-molded forms, plastic clay pressed into plaster forms to make small rectangular boxes and some vase forms, which he liked to make. These were molds which had been made to an original that he had modeled in solid clay, and during our work there, sometimes I would be pressing these forms as a means of production.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Mean, Pottery, Littles

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• In school we did all sorts of things, molds, slab building. We were not very proficient on the wheel because the woman who taught was not proficient on the wheel. And so we learned from her assistant who had learned from her assistant the year before and so on, and that was not very good training.

  Warren MacKenzie

  School, Years, Training

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• And as far as I know about Alix's [MacKenzie] work, I don't believe she ever did any sculptural work at all. It was always pottery.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Believe, Pottery, Don't Believe

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• [Sculpturing] didn't stick with me. I never felt I wanted to go on with that.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Goes On, Sticks, Wanted

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• When I was in school in the Art Institute, we had several problems during the course of the time we were taking ceramic classes where we had to do a sculptural piece. And when I say a sculptural piece, it's nothing like what we conceive of now as a sculptural piece.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Art, School, Class

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• Remember, this is back in the 1940s, and it was sculpture which probably - in my instance probably came out of the European influence, [Alexander] Archipenko and things of that sort, [Jacques] Lipchitz to a certain extent, and I was influenced by those things and attempted to do work that emulated their style.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Style, Sculpture, Remember

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• These narrow-footed forms I was making, I thought, gosh, I could push those further, not to construct them the way [Hans] Coper did but to work in my own manner but push it more toward that form. And I learned to do that and enjoyed it for a number of years.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Years, Numbers, Way

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• [My pots ] are not like [Hans] Coper's at all, but the idea came from seeing catalogue of his work, although at the time we knew Hans, his work was nothing like that.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Ideas, Pot, Seeing

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• Some years ago I was working on some forms which were vase forms with a fairly narrow base, and it was after [Hans] Coper had died that I saw an exhibition of his, a catalogue from an exhibition, and he was showing some forms which were made by cutting and joining a lot of different parts together to create what he called a spade form, which you can imagine looks a little bit like a shovel upside down.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Cutting, Years, Together

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• If you take Lucie Rie and Hans Coper, their work didn't even relate to what we were trying to do, because they were moving in a different direction, both of them coming out of Europe and the Viennese school of design, which Lucie came from, and Coper learning from Lucie and then springing off on his own when she encouraged him to explore more widely. So he created his own work instead of just working for her and doing her forms. So that was a wonderful thing.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Moving, School, Europe

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• I've been influenced by someone or [English artists] work. I mentioned Hans Coper as an example.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Artist, Example

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• I don't know, it's very difficult if you're in a strange country to just barge in and say, "Hello, I'm Warren MacKenzie, and aren't you happy to have me as a guest," you know? But artists did accept us and we remained friends for many, many years, many of them as long as they lived; like Lucie Rie and Hans Coper were very good friends, and it was wonderful.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Country, Good Friend, Artist

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• Friends of Bernard's [Leach] came to visit, and when we went to London, we were given introductions to people like Lucie Rie, Hans Coper, Richard Batram. All these people were, let's say, made available to us by a friendship with Leach. In addition there was a potter's group - what was it called? I think it was called the Cornish Potters Society, but I'm not sure of that. Anyway, they had meetings and we would go with Leach to these meetings and meet other potters, and they would have programs where they would discuss pottery and people would interchange ideas.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Thinking, Ideas, People

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• We got a great benefit from our contact with those people [Lucie Rie, Hans Coper, Richard Batram] and met people that we wouldn't have probably met if we had simply worked at the pottery.

  Warren MacKenzie

  People, Benefits, Pottery

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• [St. Ives] is a wonderful place to live. It's a small fishing town and one can live there inexpensively. There's a sympathetic population of other artists, where you can exchange ideas, and it's quite rich in artistic thought.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Artist, Fishing, Ideas

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• There were a lot of artists in St. Ives. In fact, since the time of Whistler, St. Ives has been noted as an artist colony.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Artist, Facts, Whistler

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• We benefited from living with [Bernard] Leach, because suddenly all of his friends became our acquaintances.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Acquaintance

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• Bernard [Leach] knew Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Terry Frost, Peter Lanyon, Johnny Wells. I can think of a number of people that we met there just because we were living with Bernard. Some of them became our friends, particularly the younger artists, but we were privileged to at least meet and talk with the older artists also. And they would come to dinner, and we would simply be included in the conversation, which was quite fascinating.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Thinking, Artist, Numbers

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• I make a lot of pots in a year's time and some of them are good and some of them are mediocre and some of them are bad. If they're really bad and I'd be ashamed of them, I throw them out, but if they're mediocre and they'll serve the purpose for which they're designed, that is, a mixing bowl or a soup bowl or a plate or whatever, I sell them. And this income from the sale of these pots permits me to go on and make other pots. It's even more important now that I've quit teaching, because I do not have a teacher's salary to fall back on.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Teacher, Fall, Teaching

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu