Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Warren MacKenzie
Age: 94 †
Born: 1924
Born: February 16
Died: 2018
Died: December 31
Artist
Ceramicist
Kansas City
Missouri
Warren Mackenzie
Warren Mac Kenzie
School
Drawing
Thing
Childhood
Going
Painting
Time
Involved
Taught
Courses
Course
Art
Schools

More quotes by Warren MacKenzie

Image
I took a number of graphic courses, lithography and etching and wood engraving [at Art Institute]. And particularly as I got more and more into ceramics, I thought, life drawing doesn't have anything to do with ceramics.
Warren MacKenzie
Image
We became more familiar with [Bernard Leach], and with this familiarity came, I wouldn't say contempt, but certainly an awareness that everything that he said was not necessarily what we were thinking. That doesn't mean it was wrong, but Leach was a person out of a different generation.
Warren MacKenzie
Image
It was a wonderful opportunity. And so for two and a half years we lived with [Bernard] Leach.
Warren MacKenzie
Image
[I made in army] all sorts of dumb things, but it did teach me a lot about the silk-screen process.
Warren MacKenzie
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I've been influenced by someone or [English artists] work. I mentioned Hans Coper as an example.
Warren MacKenzie
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I was a very hard-edged geometric painter, strongly influenced by [Piet] Mondrian and [Theo] van Doesburg and that sort of thing.
Warren MacKenzie
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Robert von Neumann taught painting, and when I finally got into a painting class of his, he reacted in much the same way.
Warren MacKenzie
Image
Bernard's [Leach] drawings delineated every little accent on the pot, every subtle curve and change of angle and proportion and all.
Warren MacKenzie
Image
The interesting thing was we never talked about pottery. Bernard [Leach] talked about social issues he talked about the world political situation, he talked about the economy, he talked about all kinds of things.
Warren MacKenzie
Image
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
Image
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