Warren MacKenzie Quotes
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
We could make our own pots on the weekends and in the evenings, and we used to do that, and these would be fired in the big kiln, along with all the standard ware that we were producing, but this wasn't quite what we had expected when we read The Potters Book.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Things happen very quickly and they have to happen quickly in order to have vitality, which I think is essentially part of a good pot. But in addition it means that you can explore an idea and change it and then change it and then change it; I don't mean by changing the one pot, but you make one pot then you make another that's related to that; you make another - you can make 50 pots in a day and none of them are going to be carbon copies of any other, but they'll all be related because there's something going through your mind about the form on that particular day.
-
If you press-mold a pot or if you slab-build a pot, the work has got to take much, much, much longer than if you work on the wheel. And I to this day have the ideal that I want my work to be not too expensive, so that if people buy it and break it, it's not going to be the end of the world. I'm not interested in having things in museums, although some of our work has ended up there, but that's not what I'm striving for.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Remember, this is back in the '40s, and the idea of a museum being a place where interested people could come in direct contact with works hadn't arrived on the scene yet. That, I think, I first ran into at the Freer Gallery in Washington, D.C., where a man named Marty Martin Amt decided that he really felt his job - part of his job, as an assistant to the director was to make the collection available to interested people.
-
Shoji Hamada seldom drew an exact drawing of a pot that he was going to make.
-
We had a wonderful trip, a seven-day trip, talking and sitting in the sun and so forth with Bernard Leach. And as we were approaching England, Leach said, "Do you have a place to live?" And we said, "No, we didn't." We hadn't worried about that. But Bernard had just separated from his second wife, which we had not realized, and Bernard was a person who could not stand to live alone. So he said, "Would you like to share my house with me?" Naturally we said yes.
-
So I very quickly stopped almost all decoration. I was interested in the three-dimensional form of the pots, but my decoration was nonexistent.
-
We me and my wife went back to St. Paul, worked for a year - again, I guess I would have to admit now, doing a rather shaky job of teaching people - but at the end of that year we returned to England and worked in the Bernard Leach Pottery for two and a half years.
-
If you didn't know what you were trying to do, Robert von Neumann wouldn't say a word. He would just turn and walk away. So you very quickly learned to think that you'd better be attempting to do something in that painting class.
-
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."
-
I make a lot of pots in a year's time and some of them are good and some of them are mediocre and some of them are bad. If they're really bad and I'd be ashamed of them, I throw them out, but if they're mediocre and they'll serve the purpose for which they're designed, that is, a mixing bowl or a soup bowl or a plate or whatever, I sell them. And this income from the sale of these pots permits me to go on and make other pots. It's even more important now that I've quit teaching, because I do not have a teacher's salary to fall back on.
-
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.
-
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.