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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
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Warren MacKenzie
Age: 94 †
Born: 1924
Born: February 16
Died: 2018
Died: December 31
Artist
Ceramicist
Kansas City
Missouri
Warren Mackenzie
Warren Mac Kenzie
Decided
Started
Wife
Pottery
Either
Equipped
Teach
Paul
Running
Quickly
Found
Moved
Training
More quotes by 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
I thought, oh, I'm going to be a painter. And eventually my family had moved near Chicago, and when I graduated from high school, I went to the Chicago Art Institute, and it was there that I thought, well, now I'm going to be a painter.
Warren MacKenzie
Alix [MacKenzie], on the other hand, found that her painting would translate much more readily into decoration, and she could play with the spacing and the intensity of imagery on the form in a way which I could not. So that when we established our pottery, I was most unhappy with my decoration.
Warren MacKenzie
Our main inspiration [with Alix MacKenzie], I think, came from the Field Museum of Natural History, because they had pieces which were selected not for art content but for their relationship to the anthropological history of mankind.
Warren MacKenzie
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
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
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
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
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
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 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
[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
It was a wonderful opportunity. And so for two and a half years we lived with [Bernard] Leach.
Warren MacKenzie
[ 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
[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
I've been influenced by someone or [English artists] work. I mentioned Hans Coper as an example.
Warren MacKenzie
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
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
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
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