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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

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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
Reacted
Robert
Finally
Painting
Taught
Class
Much
Way

More quotes by Warren MacKenzie

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I've been influenced by someone or [English artists] work. I mentioned Hans Coper as an example.
Warren MacKenzie
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[St. Ives] is a wonderful place to live. It's a small fishing town and one can live there inexpensively. There's a sympathetic population of other artists, where you can exchange ideas, and it's quite rich in artistic thought.
Warren MacKenzie
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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
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Every pot is not going to be a masterpiece.
Warren MacKenzie
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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
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[Sculpturing] didn't stick with me. I never felt I wanted to go on with that.
Warren MacKenzie
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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
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In school we did all sorts of things, molds, slab building. We were not very proficient on the wheel because the woman who taught was not proficient on the wheel. And so we learned from her assistant who had learned from her assistant the year before and so on, and that was not very good training.
Warren MacKenzie
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We could make our own pots on the weekends and in the evenings, and we used to do that, and these would be fired in the big kiln, along with all the standard ware that we were producing, but this wasn't quite what we had expected when we read The Potters Book.
Warren MacKenzie
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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
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Since your time is your main involvement here - I mean, the clay doesn't cost very much. Even the glaze and the firing doesn't cost a great deal. But your time is the cost, and if you can keep your time to a minimum and still come out with the results you want, that means the pots can be sold for an economic price.
Warren MacKenzie
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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