It was a figure painting class, where you had a model, and [Robert von Neumann ] would wander around and he'd come up behind someone and say, "Well, what are you trying to do?" And if you told him what you were trying to do, he would then proceed to discuss this with you and suggest things that you might look at and ways in which you could improve what you were attempting to do, etc - never worked on your painting, never touched your painting but talked extensively about what you were trying to do.

The two teachers that I had in the Art Institute who affected me the most were Kathleen Blackshear and Robert von Neumann; Kathleen Blackshear because she taught a class called design - I can't remember, design something, and in this class - it met once a week - we would do work centered around some theme, word or subject or technique or whatever, and bring it in for a three-hour discussion. And Kathleen was able, in watching and looking at our work, to direct us to all kinds of things which might relate to what we were trying to do, but she never attempted to tell us what to do.

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.

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 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.

I was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and I do know from what my parents tell me that I was always interested in art, although not very good at it.

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.