Warren MacKenzie Quotes About Pot

Quotes about: Pot

• In looking at these pots at the Field Museum, Alix [MacKenzie] and I both came to a conclusion individually but also collectively that the pots that really interested us were the pots that people had used in their everyday life, and we began to think - I mean, whether it was ancient Greece or Africa or Europe or wherever, the pots that people had used in their homes were the ones that excited us.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Mean, Home, Thinking

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• Looking back on it now, I understand why that was not possible [to express ourselves], because the pottery employed a dozen people, not all of whom are making pots. And these people had families, children, and they had to have a wage that would allow them to raise their family and they had to get a paycheck every Friday afternoon. So if we had not made pots that would sell it, would not have been possible for these people to be employed.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Friday, Children, People

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• [Shoji] Hamada seldom drew an exact drawing of a pot that he was going to make.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Drawing, Pot

  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

• We thought [with Alix MacKenzie], if those are the kinds of pots from every culture that interest us, why would we think that it should be any different in mid-North America 20th century? And we decided then that our work would center around that sort of utilitarian pottery, and that's what I've done ever since.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Thinking, America, Culture

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• We could make our own pots on the weekends and in the evenings, and we used to do that, and these would be fired in the big kiln, along with all the standard ware that we were producing, but this wasn't quite what we had expected when we read The Potters Book.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Book, Weekend, Would Be

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• Bernard's [Leach] drawings delineated every little accent on the pot, every subtle curve and change of angle and proportion and all.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Curves, Drawing, Littles

  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 find it really enriching to make pots which people are using and which they come in contact with, not only visually in their homes but tactilely - when they pick them up, when they wash them after dinner, and so on and so forth.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Home, People, Dinner

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• We never had a catalogue; we never said we were going to duplicate these pots this year and next year and the year after that and so forth. We did make many pots which were repeated, but we allowed them to change and to grow as we changed and grew, and I think that was the big difference. And that's all right; we were working for ourselves. We didn't have anybody we had to pay.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Thinking, Years, Differences

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• [Shoji] Hamada's [drawings] were little one-line notations of something he wanted to remember about a pot or a piece of furniture or a landscape or something like that, and they were just done very quickly and they had, he thought, no artistic quality. They're not great drawings, but they served to remind him of something he had in his mind, so that when he then went to the studio, that would stick in his mind and he could explore the making of the pot with the clay on the wheel.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Drawing, Mind, Quality

  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

• This is something which I think I have been able to communicate to both people I have taught and people that have purchased our work since that time, that they all say, it's so nice to have these pots with us all the time and to eat out of them and be in direct contact with them in our homes.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Nice, Home, Thinking

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• Eventually I gave up teaching at the St. Paul Gallery because of disagreements with the philosophy of that museum, and I got a job at the University of Minnesota, which was very fortunate because it was a part-time job and that gave us a great deal of time in our studio to work together and to make the pots we wanted to make.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Jobs, Philosophy, Teaching

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• Bernard [Leach] was making pots which were duplicates of his drawing, and that was a difference of approach, which I think is quite critical to these two men [Leach and Shoji Hamada].

  Warren MacKenzie

  Men, Thinking, Two

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• Every pot is not going to be a masterpiece.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Pot, Masterpiece

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• Finally if I had a pot that needed decoration, I would hand it to Alix [MacKenzie] and I would say, "Can you do something with this?" And she'd look at it for a while and then proceed with a brush to embellish the form and enhance the form, and it was wonderful. She could bring the pot to life, whereas if I did it, it was a disaster.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Hands, Looks, Wonderful

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• When we worked at the pottery, we did learn to make pots, that is, the physical act of making the pot. We learned to control clay, to put it where you want it and not just wherever it wanted to go, and that was valuable. At the end of about six months, though, I think if that was all we had, we may have been inclined to leave because the workshop did not challenge us so much as living with [Bernard] Leach did.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Thinking, Challenges, Clay

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• We were living with Bernard [Leach] in his home. He had a fantastic collection of early English and Japanese and Chinese and Korean pots and German pots, contemporary English work as well. And we had access to this collection.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Home, Chinese, Korean

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• I think back to some of the pots we made when we first started our pottery, and they were pretty awful pots. We thought at the time they were good; they were the best we could make, but our thinking was so elemental that the pots had that quality also, and so they don't have a richness about them which I look for in my work today. Whether I achieve it all the time, that's another question, because I don't think a person can produce at top level 100 percent of the time.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Thinking, Quality, Looks

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• So I very quickly stopped almost all decoration. I was interested in the three-dimensional form of the pots, but my decoration was nonexistent.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Three, Pot, Form

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• We did respect [Bernard Leach], although we also were willing to challenge ideas and at least put forth our feelings about the way the pottery was run, about things that were done, about the pots we were making, etc. And we would get into sometimes some very fierce arguments. We'd be shouting at one another because of disagreements.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Running, Ideas, Challenges

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

• In fact, when Bernard [Leach] would be called away to go up to London for something and we'd be living alone for a couple of days, we would dig into the storage areas in the house and we'd get out all the pots that we might not see in the course of our daily life, because we weren't using them in the house on a steady basis. But we found some fantastic pots in there tucked away, and we could look at them and examine them and handle them.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Couple, House, Would Be

  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

• I found out later on that was not true, that life drawing tells you a great deal about rhythm, about the structure of a human being or any animate object, and this could be directly translated into thinking about proportion and accent, rhythm in a pot form.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Thinking, Drawing, Pot

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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