Surface tension Warren MacKenzie and Sequoia Miller at June Fitzpatrick BY CHRIS THOMPSON

Playwright Tom Stoppard once joked: "Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art."

What’s worth noting about Stoppard’s quip is that, though it was devised in order to deliver a backhand to the most self-important makers and supporters of 20th-century modernist art, this two-line one-liner is actually more offensive in its treatment of what is called craft than in its indictment of the avant-garde.

To push an obvious point: What of those endeavors that blend skill and imagination (Stoppard’s plays notwithstanding)? These are the works that make it unimportant and uninteresting to distinguish art from craft — a debate nearly as tired as the "my-kid-could-do-that" engagement with modernism. And yet it holds fast because of a continued investment in being able to consider certain practices just a bit more cutting edge than all the rest, the better to draw a bit more actual and cultural capital from their production, promotion, and circulation.

There are few artists who have been more successful in resisting this ethos than potter Warren MacKenzie, one of the central figures in the Studio Pottery movement and a living legend to young ceramicists. From 1949 to 1952, MacKenzie apprenticed with the great Bernard Leach in his studio in St. Ives, England, where Leach had moved in 1921, together with Japanese ceramicist Shoji Hamada, and began a revolution in the making of pottery the impact of which has been lasting and international. Leach and Hamada invented a fusion of British Arts-and-Crafts design philosophy and Japanese aesthetics. The sources of their inspiration were varied — Japanese folk ceramics, traditional British slipware — and they investigated them with a scientific rigor, keeping careful records of their experiments with glaze chemistry.

MacKenzie’s work embodies the serious eclecticism and dynamic internationalism of this tradition, which he meshes with a decidedly American populism — both as a maker and as a seller of his work. Even today, at the age of 80, he insists that his work be affordable and accessible to as broad a range of lookers and buyers as possible. He maintains an "honor system" showroom adjacent to the pottery studio where he works every day. Says gallerist June Fitzpatrick: "Warren has a rule that visitors can only buy two pots at a time, no more — and there are works of his that you can buy for as little as $25, so many collectors do in fact try to acquire large numbers of his works and then resell them at higher prices.

"For this reason he stopped signing his work some time ago," she continues, "though his work is so unmistakable that this is only partly effective. I am amazed to see that an artist of his age and stature would still have this great faith in human nature."

This egalitarian commitment has complicated Fitzpatrick’s work as a gallerist. The show, which packs the gallery with over a hundred of the most elegant objects you could hope to encounter, is now a flurry of the red polka dots that signify sold work; she has had to watch the transactions to make sure that nobody purchases more than four items.

MacKenzie’s vessels represent a commingling of skill and imagination on every level; even his skills seem to have imagination, and his imagination skill. His "Drop Rim Bowl," made of clay, is what stone would look like if it could wilt. The walls of this shallow cylinder, inscribed with ornamental lines that hold the surface like strands of barbed wire, flare subtly at the bottom edge, accentuating the gravity of its mottled base and making the form hover on a half-inch pillow of space.

He describes the experience of successful pottery as a capturing of the eye that unfolds as a stirring of the body. "A potter first attracts the eye through form, color, textures, gesture, and possibly decorative surfaces. Eventually," he explains, "such things as weight, balance, tactile relations, and suitability to function begin to engage us."

This provides a lucid way of looking at Miller’s work. If MacKenzie’s pottery comes out of a mid-century blossoming of the experimental encounter of Eastern and Western aesthetics, Miller’s emerges from a late-20th-century multiculturalism that he has shaped into a fertile ground for his formal investigations.

Speaking of his debt to MacKenzie’s work and the genealogy it represents, Miller writes: "Studio Pottery’s ethical dimension has proved to be elastic. My work is informed by a cultural milieu (minimalism, Cher, cyberspace) vastly changed since Bernard Leach returned from Japan."

Miller’s work has a poise that comes from a willingness to do violence to symmetry. His "Set of 9 Black and Ash Lunch Plates" is as much a map of elemental forces in conflict as the setting for a meal. A spiral traces its way out from the center of the plate, recording the process by which it was thrown into being. Its line pushes against the circle that defines the plate’s form, and is pushed back by the negative spaces established by Miller’s linear cuts across the plate’s circumference. One of these leaves a jagged corner on which Miller has etched a symbol, a sweeping line broken at its midpoint by several perpendicular hatches, which seems a direct evocation of MacKenzie’s "Drop Rim Bowl." However, the power of Miller’s form comes not from the balance that marks MacKenzie’s work but rather by a seductive ability to push us off balance.

Chris Thompson teaches at the Maine College of Art. He can be reached at xxtopher@hotmail.com

"Warren MacKenzie and Sequoia Miller: Two American Potters" is at the June Fitzpatrick Gallery at the Maine College of Art through March 26. Call (207) 879-5742 x283.