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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

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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
Living
Potter
Experience
Potters
Thought
Motivated
Work
Fantastic
Mind
Began
Really
Inside
Leach
Life
Hours
Pottery
Understand
Bernard

More quotes by 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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It was a wonderful opportunity. And so for two and a half years we lived with [Bernard] Leach.
Warren MacKenzie
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Eventually we even got to the point where we could disagree with [Bernard Leach]. I mean, when we first went there, gee, I mean, this was a man who had written a book. He was, in a sense, God, and we for the first couple of weeks called him Mr. Leach.
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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We benefited from living with [Bernard] Leach, because suddenly all of his friends became our acquaintances.
Warren MacKenzie
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When we finished [training with my wife] we came to St. Paul, because St. Paul was the first place where we got a job offer and we needed some sort of a job to earn some money in order to set up our own studio. It's rather ironic that this job offer came originally through the Walker Art Center.
Warren MacKenzie
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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
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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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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
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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
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There were a lot of artists in St. Ives. In fact, since the time of Whistler, St. Ives has been noted as an artist colony.
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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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
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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
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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
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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
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We'll be potters, we'll be painters, we'll be textile designers, we'll be jewelers, we'll be a little this, a little of that. We were going to be the renaissance people [when we were young].
Warren MacKenzie
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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
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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
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[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