James Turrell Quotes

I'm known as a light artist. But rather than be someone who depicted light, or painted light in some way, I wanted to have the work be light.

To have a certain new eight-and-a-hal f-minute-old light from the sun-to feel it physically, almost as we taste things-this is where you can work with light like that.

My desire is to set up a situation to which I take you and let you see. It becomes your experience.

Remember technology does not make good work. You can still write a poem on a brown paper bag, and haiku is just as profound as the pyramids.

We create the reality in which we live.

My work is about your seeing. There is a rich tradition in painting of work about light, but it is not light
it is the record of seeing. My material is light, and it is responsive to your seeing.

The sky is no longer out there, but it is right on the edge of the space you are in. The sense of colour is generated inside you. If you then go outside you will see a different coloured sky. You colour the sky.

Space has a way of looking. It seems like it has a presence of vision. When you come into it, it is there, it's been waiting for you.

We think of color as a thing that we're receiving. And if you go into one of the Skyspaces, you can see that it's possible to change the color of the sky. Now, I obviously don't change the color of the sky, but I changed the context of vision.

It was important that people come to value light as we value gold, silver, paintings, objects.

I was maybe 5 or 6, and my grandmother would begin sitting me in the Quaker meeting house. I asked my grandmother, 'What am I supposed to do?' and she said, 'Just wait, we're going inside to greet the light.' I liked that - this idea to go inside to find that light within, literally as well as figuratively.

I've always felt that night doesn't fall. Night rises. There are these incidences in flying where you just sit there. It's one of the best seats in the house.

I want to create an atmosphere that can be consciously plumbed with seeing, like the wordless thought that comes from looking in a fire.

My works are about light in the sense that light is present and there; the work is made of light. It's not about light or a record of it, but it is light. Light is not so much something that reveals, as it is itself revelation.

[My work] is using light as a material to influence or affect the medium of perception. I feel that I want to use light as this wonderful and magic elixir that we drink as Vitamin D through the skin - and I mean, we are literally light-eaters - to then affect the way that we see.

Light is not so much something that reveals, as it is itself the revelation.

We eat light, drink it in through our skins. With a little more exposure to light, you feel part of things physically. I like feeling the power of light and space physically because then you can order it materially. Seeing is a very sensuous act-there's a sweet deliciousness to feeling yourself see something.

I'm interested that light has thingness itself, so it's not something that reveals something about other things you're looking at, but it becomes a revelation in itself.

When you're O.C.D., you want the most beautiful animals.