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Bernard Leach knew Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Terry Frost, Peter Lanyon, Johnny Wells. I can think of a number of people that we met there just because we were living with Bernard. Some of them became our friends, particularly the younger artists, but we were privileged to at least meet and talk with the older artists also. And they would come to dinner, and we would simply be included in the conversation, which was quite fascinating.
Warren MacKenzie -
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 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.
Warren MacKenzie -
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 -
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.
Warren MacKenzie -
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.
Warren MacKenzie -
We benefited from living with Bernard Leach, because suddenly all of his friends became our acquaintances.
Warren MacKenzie -
I found out later on that was not true, that life drawing tells you a great deal about rhythm, about the structure of a human being or any animate object, and this could be directly translated into thinking about proportion and accent, rhythm in a pot form.
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 -
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.
Warren MacKenzie -
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 -
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 -
In the Leach Pottery we did most of our work on the wheel. Bernard Leach did a little work in the studio, which was press-molded forms, plastic clay pressed into plaster forms to make small rectangular boxes and some vase forms, which he liked to make. These were molds which had been made to an original that he had modeled in solid clay, and during our work there, sometimes I would be pressing these forms as a means of production.
Warren MacKenzie -
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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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.
Warren MacKenzie -
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.
Warren MacKenzie -
I'm striving to make things which are the most exciting things I can make that will fit in people's homes. And in that respect, working on the wheel is economically about the only answer I know, because one can, as Leach said, make 50 pots in a day. You can make 100 pots in a day. A really good potter can make 400 pots in a day.
Warren MacKenzie -
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 -
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.
Warren MacKenzie -
In looking at these pots at the Field Museum, Alix MacKenzie and I both came to a conclusion individually but also collectively that the pots that really interested us were the pots that people had used in their everyday life, and we began to think - I mean, whether it was ancient Greece or Africa or Europe or wherever, the pots that people had used in their homes were the ones that excited us.
Warren MacKenzie
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When we worked at the pottery, we did learn to make pots, that is, the physical act of making the pot. We learned to control clay, to put it where you want it and not just wherever it wanted to go, and that was valuable. At the end of about six months, though, I think if that was all we had, we may have been inclined to leave because the workshop did not challenge us so much as living with Bernard Leach did.
Warren MacKenzie -
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 -
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 -
Our main inspiration with Alix MacKenzie, I think, came from the Field Museum of Natural History, because they had pieces which were selected not for art content but for their relationship to the anthropological history of mankind.
Warren MacKenzie