Warren MacKenzie Quotes - Page 4

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Army Art Books Design Home House Opportunity

Other thing about [Field Museum of Natural History] which inspired was that in a group of pots you wouldn't see a single example of this kind of pot. You would perhaps see a case with 20 different examples. So you realize that these pots could be repeated again and again, and each time there would be minor variations in them.

Warren MacKenzie

Museums, Different, Would Be

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[In the Field Museum of Natural History] we could see very simple, primitive, hand-built pottery from Babylonia and ancient Egypt and so forth, Greece. We could see the most sophisticated things that came out of the Orient - Japan, Korea, and China - some few pieces of European porcelain, majolica [tin glazed earthenware], and that sort of thing. But they had a marvelous collection.

Warren MacKenzie

Simple, Museums, Egypt

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Chicago is a wonderful area because it's blessed with a tremendous number of museums of various sorts, not only the Art Institute of Chicago but the Field Museum of Natural History, the Oriental Museum on the south side.

Warren MacKenzie

Art, Blessed, Museums

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When you're young, you think you can do anything, and we thought.

Warren MacKenzie

Thinking, Young, Can Do

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That [silk-screen process experience] carried over when I returned from the Army and took more graphic classes at the Institute. And Alix [MacKenzie] and I actually began to produce a line of textiles, which had silk-screen patterns on them.

Warren MacKenzie

Army, Class, Textiles

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[I made in army] all sorts of dumb things, but it did teach me a lot about the silk-screen process.

Warren MacKenzie

Army, Dumb, Made

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I got drafted into the army and by pure chance was pushed into a silk-screen shop at this camp where I was, because they could not get training posters fast enough out of a central source in Washington, D.C. So they set up their own shop to print training posters: how to dismantle a machine gun, etc.

Warren MacKenzie

Army, Gun, Training

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I started to do silk-screen in the early days of my painting training, due to a woman who taught art history at the institute, Kathleen Blackshear. She was interested in silk screen and taught a class that I took.

Warren MacKenzie

Art, Class, Training

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We stayed on at the Institute [Chicago called the School of Design] because that was - I don't know, you start at one place and you stay there, I guess. Inertia takes over.

Warren MacKenzie

School, Design, Chicago

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There was a school in Chicago called the School of Design. This was started by [Laszló] Moholy-Nagy, and it was a wonderful school, but we [with Alix MacKenzie] didn't go to that school. We did have friends who went to that school and we would visit there often, and I'm sure it pushed me in my painting direction very strongly just by association.

Warren MacKenzie

School, Design, Association

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[ Bernard] Leach was the one who taught us that, because he, too, had started out as a painter and an etcher and had only gotten into ceramics by chance when he was in Japan trying to teach the Japanese how to do etching, which, as he said, they were not ready for yet.

Warren MacKenzie

Japan, Taught Us, Trying

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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

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It was a figure painting class, where you had a model, and [Robert von Neumann ] would wander around and he'd come up behind someone and say, "Well, what are you trying to do?" And if you told him what you were trying to do, he would then proceed to discuss this with you and suggest things that you might look at and ways in which you could improve what you were attempting to do, etc - never worked on your painting, never touched your painting but talked extensively about what you were trying to do.

Warren MacKenzie

Class, Trying, Looks

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If you didn't know what you were trying to do, [Robert von Neumann] wouldn't say a word. He would just turn and walk away. So you very quickly learned to think that you'd better be attempting to do something in that painting class.

Warren MacKenzie

Thinking, Class, Trying

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Those two teachers [Kathleen Blackshear and Robert von Neumann] were just fantastic, I thought. They never directed you in a single direction, but they just encouraged you to think for yourself.

Warren MacKenzie

Teacher, Thinking, Two

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I do remember that when we left [Bernard Leach] after two and a half years, we went home on a boat again - this was before air travel became really easy - and Alix [MacKenzie] turned to me and she said, "You know, that was a great two years of training, but that's not the way we're going to run our pottery."

Warren MacKenzie

Running, Home, Air

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Living with [Bernard] Leach, who thought about pottery 24 hours a day, was a fantastic experience, and we really began to get inside his mind and understand what had motivated him to work all his life as a potter.

Warren MacKenzie

Mind, Potters, Pottery

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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

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It was a wonderful opportunity. And so for two and a half years we lived with [Bernard] Leach.

Warren MacKenzie

Opportunity, Years, Two

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We had a wonderful trip, a seven-day trip, talking and sitting in the sun and so forth [with Bernard Leach]. And as we were approaching England, Leach said, "Do you have a place to live?" And we said, "No, we didn't." We hadn't worried about that. But Bernard had just separated from his second wife, which we had not realized, and Bernard was a person who could not stand to live alone. So he said, "Would you like to share my house with me?" Naturally we said yes.

Warren MacKenzie

Talking, Wife, House

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We were more fortunate than most, because [Bernard] Leach had been in America on a lecture tour in 1950, and we made arrangements to travel from America back to England with him on the same boat. It was a very slow boat. I think it took us about seven days to cross the Atlantic.

Warren MacKenzie

Thinking, America, Lectures

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[Bernard Leach] talked about painting, but we never talked about ceramics in that evening. But at the end of the evening he said to us, "Well," he said, "I've changed my mind, and if you want, you can come back a year from now and apprentice in the workshop."

Warren MacKenzie

Years, Mind, Ceramics

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We asked a lot of questions and we watched everyone who was working in the studio. And we had an opportunity to sit in on discussions, aesthetic discussions at the pottery, which took place generally over tea breaks in the morning and afternoon. So we learned a lot just from being around there [with Bernard Leach ].

Warren MacKenzie

Morning, Opportunity, Tea

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Every day we'd trudge up the hill - it was a three-quarter-mile walk up this steep hill to the Leach Pottery, and we would take our lunch with us and generally, I guess, make a nuisance of ourselves.

Warren MacKenzie

Lunch, Three, Nuisance

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We [with Alix MacKenzie] had decided we needed further training, and certainly Leach was the one we turned to. So we went to England this summer and we took examples of our work along with us and showed them to Bernard Leach and told him what we were trying to do. And of course he took one look at our work and he said - very quickly he said, "I'm sorry, we're full up," and this was his way of politely saying, you just don't make the cut.

Warren MacKenzie

Summer, Sorry, Cutting

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Latest quotes from interviews

"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,

www.aaa.si.edu, added Mar 22, 2017

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