Warren MacKenzie Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• We [me and my wife] went back to St. Paul, worked for a year - again, I guess I would have to admit now, doing a rather shaky job of teaching people - but at the end of that year we returned to England and worked in the [Bernard] Leach Pottery for two and a half years.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Jobs, Teaching, Years

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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• Alix [MacKenzie] was a looser, more linear painter, dealing with amoebic forms, let's say, close to [Joan] Miró as opposed to my more static exploration of space.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Space, Exploration, Form

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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• I was a very hard-edged geometric painter, strongly influenced by [Piet] Mondrian and [Theo] van Doesburg and that sort of thing.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Vans, Painter, Geometric

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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• At that [childhood] time, of course, if you were involved in art, it was going to be drawing and painting, because that's the only thing that was taught in the schools.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Art, School, Drawing

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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• I went to the Chicago Art Institute, which was the best painting school in the area at that time. And I took painting classes - basic elementary painting classes and drawing classes of all sorts.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Art, School, Class

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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• In the middle of my second year at school, in 1943, I got drafted into the army, was gone for three years, and when I came back, I tried to get into the painting classes which I wanted, but because of all the returned GIs [the GI Bill], everyone was in school and the classes were all full. So I looked at the catalogue and found that there was a ceramic class offered and that there was space in that. I registered for a ceramic class and some drawing classes.

  Warren MacKenzie

  School, Army, Years

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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• What I didn't know at the time [of my scholarship] was that the ceramic class was not really a very good class. This was many years ago and should not reflect on the conditions at the Art Institute of Chicago to this day, but we didn't know anything and we started to learn about how to work with clay.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Art, Years, Class

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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• We both [with Alixandra Kolesky MacKenzie] got into ceramics, you might say, by the back door. Looking back on it, I think this was a very good thing.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Thinking, Doors, Ceramics

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• When we finished [training with my wife] we came to St. Paul, because St. Paul was the first place where we got a job offer and we needed some sort of a job to earn some money in order to set up our own studio. It's rather ironic that this job offer came originally through the Walker Art Center.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Art, Jobs, Order

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• Hilda Reiss was the head of the Everyday Art Gallery. Hilda Reiss came from Germany, had trained at the original Bauhaus in Germany, and her training inspired her to think of anything that she liked as art.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Art, Thinking, Everyday

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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• We moved up here [to St.Paul with my wife] and started to teach, we very quickly found out we were not equipped either to teach or to run our own pottery, and so we decided that we had to have further training.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Running, Wife, Training

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• [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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

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• I used to think [Shoji] Hamada never drew, until there was a book by Bernard [Leach] published about his work [Hamada: Potter, Tokyo; New York: Harper & Row, 1975] and at the rear of the book were a number of wonderful little sketches, but they were not drawings like Bernard made.

  Warren MacKenzie

  New York, Book, Thinking

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• [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

  4 Copy quote

• If [Bernard Leach] didn't like the drawing, he'd X it out and do another one and change the form a little bit. And when he was all done, he would stuff these pieces of paper in his pocket and go off to the pottery, and when he wanted to make pots, he would then take these out and he'd begin to produce the pot that he had designed on paper in front of us.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Drawing, Pockets, Done

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• Alix [ MacKenzie] had stopped teaching because we had a child and she stayed home to take care of the baby, and I taught.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Baby, Children, Teaching

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

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• 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

  4 Copy quote

• It was there that we really first came in contact with the work of Shoji Hamada, who was Bernard's best friend from Japan, who had come from Japan back to England with [Bernard] Leach when Leach was establishing his pottery.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Japan, Pottery, Firsts

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• Bernard [Leach] had acquired many [Shoji] Hamada works. Some of them, it was interesting - first of all, Hamada worked in St. Ives for about four years before returning to Japan to start his own pottery. He had exhibitions in London, and if these exhibitions didn't sell out, the galleries were instructed to send the remaining work down to the Leach Pottery, where they would go into the showroom for sale. If Bernard saw one that hadn't sold that he really admired, then he would take it (he would buy it), and it would go into the house.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Japan, Years, Interesting

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• Bernard [Leach] was, as I said , trained as a painter and an etcher.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Said, Painter

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

• [Bernard Leach] was an incredible draftsman, and at the end of breakfast time, for instance, he would push his plate back, and he'd pull an old scrap of paper out of his pocket and a little stub of a pencil, and he'd begin to make small drawings, about an inch and a half, two inches tall, of pots that he wanted to make. And they were beautiful drawings. I really wish I'd stolen some of those scraps of paper, because those drawings were exquisite explorations of his ideas of form and volume in a ceramic piece.

  Warren MacKenzie

  Beautiful, Ideas, Two

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

  4 Copy quote

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