Warren MacKenzie Quotes
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Looking back on it now, I understand why that was not possible to express ourselves, because the pottery employed a dozen people, not all of whom are making pots. And these people had families, children, and they had to have a wage that would allow them to raise their family and they had to get a paycheck every Friday afternoon. So if we had not made pots that would sell it, would not have been possible for these people to be employed.
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Remember, this is back in the 1940s, and it was sculpture which probably - in my instance probably came out of the European influence, Alexander Archipenko and things of that sort, Jacques Lipchitz to a certain extent, and I was influenced by those things and attempted to do work that emulated their style.
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Robert von Neumann taught painting, and when I finally got into a painting class of his, he reacted in much the same way.
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The interesting thing was we never talked about pottery. Bernard Leach talked about social issues; he talked about the world political situation, he talked about the economy, he talked about all kinds of things.
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If Bernard Leach didn't like the drawing, he'd X it out and do another one and change the form a little bit. And when he was all done, he would stuff these pieces of paper in his pocket and go off to the pottery, and when he wanted to make pots, he would then take these out and he'd begin to produce the pot that he had designed on paper in front of us.
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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.
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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.
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Here is this ability to explore ideas, but with minute changes, and then look at the results. Often you get so excited about what you're doing that you think, "Oh, wow, this is just great." And you look at it a week later and you realize you'd been excited by the act of creation, but what you've created is not really exciting when you look at it in cold blood. And so that, to me, is a valuable lesson also.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I think back to some of the pots we made when we first started our pottery, and they were pretty awful pots. We thought at the time they were good; they were the best we could make, but our thinking was so elemental that the pots had that quality also, and so they don't have a richness about them which I look for in my work today. Whether I achieve it all the time, that's another question, because I don't think a person can produce at top level 100 percent of the time.
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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.
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In the Field Museum of Natural History we could see very simple, primitive, hand-built pottery from Babylonia and ancient Egypt and so forth, Greece. We could see the most sophisticated things that came out of the Orient - Japan, Korea, and China - some few pieces of European porcelain, majolica tin glazed earthenware, and that sort of thing. But they had a marvelous collection.
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Alix MacKenzie had stopped teaching because we had a child and she stayed home to take care of the baby, and I taught.
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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.
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It was a wonderful opportunity. And so for two and a half years we lived with Bernard Leach.
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We asked a lot of questions and we watched everyone who was working in the studio. And we had an opportunity to sit in on discussions, aesthetic discussions at the pottery, which took place generally over tea breaks in the morning and afternoon. So we learned a lot just from being around there with Bernard Leach.
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There was a school in Chicago called the School of Design. This was started by Laszló Moholy-Nagy, and it was a wonderful school, but we with Alix MacKenzie didn't go to that school. We did have friends who went to that school and we would visit there often, and I'm sure it pushed me in my painting direction very strongly just by association.
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Shoji Hamada's drawings were little one-line notations of something he wanted to remember about a pot or a piece of furniture or a landscape or something like that, and they were just done very quickly and they had, he thought, no artistic quality. They're not great drawings, but they served to remind him of something he had in his mind, so that when he then went to the studio, that would stick in his mind and he could explore the making of the pot with the clay on the wheel.
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If you take Lucie Rie and Hans Coper, their work didn't even relate to what we were trying to do, because they were moving in a different direction, both of them coming out of Europe and the Viennese school of design, which Lucie came from, and Coper learning from Lucie and then springing off on his own when she encouraged him to explore more widely. So he created his own work instead of just working for her and doing her forms. So that was a wonderful thing.
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When you're young, you think you can do anything, and we thought.
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I thought, oh, I'm going to be a painter. And eventually my family had moved near Chicago, and when I graduated from high school, I went to the Chicago Art Institute, and it was there that I thought, well, now I'm going to be a painter.