Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
In fact, I believe to a certain extent a person today who starts with just clay, with no drawing and no painting and no figure drawing, still-life drawing, various things, they miss a great deal.
Warren MacKenzie
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Believe
Facts
Various
Things
Stills
Figure
Life
Certain
Figures
Still
Missing
Clay
Today
Deal
Extent
Persons
Painting
Starts
Person
Deals
Drawing
Great
Fact
Miss
More quotes by Warren MacKenzie
[Shoji] Hamada seldom drew an exact drawing of a pot that he was going to make.
Warren MacKenzie
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
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
[I made in army] all sorts of dumb things, but it did teach me a lot about the silk-screen process.
Warren MacKenzie
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
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
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
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
[Kathleen Blackshear] just said, Have you thought of looking at this? and so on and so on and so on. And it was a discussion group where everyone had a say, and it was a tremendous learning experience.
Warren MacKenzie
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
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
In working on a drawing or a painting, one can rework and rework and rework and change ideas until you get it the way you think is right at that time. With clay that's not possible. You either succeed the first time, or you should wad it up and start over again, because you can't mess around with the clay and still have it fresh.
Warren MacKenzie
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
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
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
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
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
Every pot is not going to be a masterpiece.
Warren MacKenzie
[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
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
