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[Shoji] Hamada seldom drew an exact drawing of a pot that he was going to make.

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
Drawing
Going
Make
Drew
Pot
Exact
Seldom

More quotes by Warren MacKenzie

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I was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and I do know from what my parents tell me that I was always interested in art, although not very good at it.
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] 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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I've been influenced by someone or [English artists] work. I mentioned Hans Coper as an example.
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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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
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When Bernard [Leach] wrote his book, he wrote about the fact that even when pots are made in a series, there is a personality to each pot and that the person who made it reflects their personality into the clay.
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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Every day we'd trudge up the hill - it was a three-quarter-mile walk up this steep hill to the Leach Pottery, and we would take our lunch with us and generally, I guess, make a nuisance of ourselves.
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 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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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
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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
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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
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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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[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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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
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When you're young, you think you can do anything, and we thought.
Warren MacKenzie
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These narrow-footed forms I was making, I thought, gosh, I could push those further, not to construct them the way [Hans] Coper did but to work in my own manner but push it more toward that form. And I learned to do that and enjoyed it for a number of years.
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