James Turrell Quotes

We create the reality in which we live.

In thinking of light, if we can think about what it can do, and what it is, by thinking about itself, not about what we wanted it to do for other things, because again we've used light as people might be used, in the sense that we use it to light paintings. We use it to light so that we can read. We don't really pay much attention to the light itself. And so turning that and letting light and sound speak for itself is that you figure out these different relationships and rules.

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

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

I wanted the light to be the revelation. It has to do with what we value. I want people to treasure 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.

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.

The Meeting is actually like the Gunpowder Meeting, or some of the earlier American Quaker MeetingsThe long house form is something that was traditionthat's what I started with as an idea. But then making this in terms of the sizing and the use that was asked for by Live Oak Meeting- I mean it's a very traditional form, except it's convertible. The top opens, and it makes a sky space where sky is really brought down to you; your awareness of it is made quite different. It was a little bit of a novel idea, that it's a roof that opens.

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.

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 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.

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.

With no object no image and no focus, what are you looking at? You are looking at you looking.

[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.

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.

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.

We eat light, drink it in through our skins

We live within this reality we create, and we're quite unaware of how we create the reality. So the work is often a general koan into how we go about forming this world in which we live, in particular with seeing.

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.

I make spaces that apprehend light for our perception, and in some ways gather it, or seem to hold it...my work is more about your seeing than it is about my seeing, although it is a product of my seeing.

I’ve always felt that night doesn’t fall. Night rises.

I am not an Earth artist, I'm totally involved in the sky.

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.

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

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.

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.

It is interesting to work in Las Vegas. I've always thought of Las Vegas as Los Angeles on its day off. There's not any hierarchy of taste, and that's what L.A. always was to me: It's not really a town of culture, it's a town of entertainment.

Light is a powerful substance. We have a primal connection to it. But, for something so powerful, situations for its felt presence are fragile . . . I like to work with it so that you feel it physically, so you feel the presence of light inhabiting a space.

I like when you feel like you arrive in a very different place, with a different ordering of the reality you normally think of.

Science strives for answers, but art is happy with a good question.

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

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

I always wanted to make a light that looks like the light you see in your dream. Because the way that light infuses the dream, the way the atmosphere is colored, the way light rains off people with auras and things like that...We don't normally see light like that. But we all know it. So this is no unfamiliar territory - or not unfamiliar light. I like to have this kind of light that reminds us of this other place we know.