Warren MacKenzie Quotes
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Bernard's Leach drawings delineated every little accent on the pot, every subtle curve and change of angle and proportion and all.
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Bernard Leach was, as I said , trained as a painter and an etcher.
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Sculpturing didn't stick with me. I never felt I wanted to go on with that.
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I've been influenced by someone or English artists work. I mentioned Hans Coper as an example.
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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.
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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.
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Bernard Leach had acquired many Shoji Hamada works. Some of them, it was interesting - first of all, Hamada worked in St. Ives for about four years before returning to Japan to start his own pottery. He had exhibitions in London, and if these exhibitions didn't sell out, the galleries were instructed to send the remaining work down to the Leach Pottery, where they would go into the showroom for sale. If Bernard saw one that hadn't sold that he really admired, then he would take it (he would buy it), and it would go into the house.
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Those two teachers Kathleen Blackshear and Robert von Neumann were just fantastic, I thought. They never directed you in a single direction, but they just encouraged you to think for yourself.
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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.
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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.
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What I didn't know at the time of my scholarship was that the ceramic class was not really a very good class. This was many years ago and should not reflect on the conditions at the Art Institute of Chicago to this day, but we didn't know anything and we started to learn about how to work with clay.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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We were working from very exact models and dimensions and weights of clay to make these pots which had been designed some 10 or 12 years previous to our arriving at Bernard's Leach studio. And we, being, I guess you would say young, arrogant Americans, thought that we ought to be able to somehow express ourselves a little bit more in the daily work of the pottery.
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In fact, Bernard Leach was several generations removed from us. At that time we were there, I think Alix MacKenzie and I were 26 and 28, and Leach was about 63, and we thought he was a very old man. I used to always want to help him up the stairs in the house for fear he'd fall. Actually, he was in excellent condition and lived to be much, much older than we ever expected.
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And as far as I know about Alix's MacKenzie work, I don't believe she ever did any sculptural work at all. It was always pottery.
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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.
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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.
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I don't know, it's very difficult if you're in a strange country to just barge in and say, "Hello, I'm Warren MacKenzie, and aren't you happy to have me as a guest," you know? But artists did accept us and we remained friends for many, many years, many of them as long as they lived; like Lucie Rie and Hans Coper were very good friends, and it was wonderful.
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I thought I was going to be able to use my painting ideas as decoration on pottery, but my painting did not translate into decoration on pottery. I thought it was going to, and in fact I made, while still in school, a plate with one of my paintings on it, and that's exactly what it was, it was a plate with a painting on it. It was not a decorated plate; it was just a painting superimposed over a three-dimensional ceramic form.
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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.
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Finally if I had a pot that needed decoration, I would hand it to Alix MacKenzie and I would say, "Can you do something with this?" And she'd look at it for a while and then proceed with a brush to embellish the form and enhance the form, and it was wonderful. She could bring the pot to life, whereas if I did it, it was a disaster.