-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Some years ago I was working on some forms which were vase forms with a fairly narrow base, and it was after Hans Coper had died that I saw an exhibition of his, a catalogue from an exhibition, and he was showing some forms which were made by cutting and joining a lot of different parts together to create what he called a spade form, which you can imagine looks a little bit like a shovel upside down.
-
In searching for further training we turned to England and Bernard Leach. We thought since we had responded to his book so strongly that this would be the sort of training that we would like to have. We saved money, during the summer went to Europe, and the first stop was to go to England, visit the Leach Pottery and ask Leach if he would take us on as apprentices.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Bernard Leach was an incredible draftsman, and at the end of breakfast time, for instance, he would push his plate back, and he'd pull an old scrap of paper out of his pocket and a little stub of a pencil, and he'd begin to make small drawings, about an inch and a half, two inches tall, of pots that he wanted to make. And they were beautiful drawings. I really wish I'd stolen some of those scraps of paper, because those drawings were exquisite explorations of his ideas of form and volume in a ceramic piece.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Other thing about Field Museum of Natural History which inspired was that in a group of pots you wouldn't see a single example of this kind of pot. You would perhaps see a case with 20 different examples. So you realize that these pots could be repeated again and again, and each time there would be minor variations in them.
-
It was there that we really first came in contact with the work of Shoji Hamada, who was Bernard's best friend from Japan, who had come from Japan back to England with Bernard Leach when Leach was establishing his pottery.
-
In fact, when Bernard Leach would be called away to go up to London for something and we'd be living alone for a couple of days, we would dig into the storage areas in the house and we'd get out all the pots that we might not see in the course of our daily life, because we weren't using them in the house on a steady basis. But we found some fantastic pots in there tucked away, and we could look at them and examine them and handle them.
-
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.
-
At the end of that two weeks Bernard Leach asked us if we would like to sit with him tending the kiln, the big oil-fired kiln that they had. He was still sitting what we call a kiln watch at that time, and he wondered if we would like to sit the watch with him and talk. So naturally this was our last opportunity to talk with him, so we said yes. We didn't realize Bernard's kiln watch was from 1:00 in the morning until 4:00 AM.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.