Top 132 Quotes & Sayings by James Turrell
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American artist James Turrell.
Last updated on September 17, 2024.
I am involved in the architecture of space.
I like to work with it so that you feel it physically, so you feel the presence of light inhabiting a space. My desire is to set up a situation to which I take you and let you see. It becomes your experience.
I sell blue sky and coloured air.
I want to create an atmosphere that can be consciously plumbed with seeing... like the wordless thought that comes from looking in a fire.
We think we receive all that we perceive, but in fact, we actually give the sky its colour.
All art is contemporary art because it had to be made when it was now.
The people in L.A. do orient themselves to light. I used to call it 'Tan Fascist Culture.' Everyone there is tanned, wears dark sunglasses, looks like a movie star even when they're not.
We live within this reality we create, and we're quite unaware of how we create the reality.
The sky always seems to be out there, away from us. I like to bring it down in close contact with us, so you feel you are in it. We feel we are at the bottom of this ocean of air; we are actually on a planet.
I like illusion when it is so convincing that we might as well see reality this way - I like to present to our belief system something that is convincing, that 'we know not to be.'
Light is a powerful substance. We have a primal connection to it. But, for something so powerful, situations for its felt presence are fragile.
In a way, light unites the spiritual world and the ephemeral, physical world. People frequently talk about spiritual experiences using the vocabulary of light: Saul on the road to Damascus, near-death experiences, samadhi or the light-filled void of Buddhist enlightenment.
You can't stop demographics. And show me a fence that ever worked. It didn't work at Hadrian's Wall. The Great Wall of China didn't work. The Berlin Wall.
The works of previous artists have come from their own experiences or insights but haven't given the experience itself. They had set themselves up as a sort of interpreter to the layman... Our interest is in a form where you realize that the media are just perception.
I feel my work is made for one being, one individual. You could say that's me, but that's not really true. It's for an idealized viewer.
I hope that when you see my work, you are looking at yourself looking.
If you take blue paint and yellow paint and you mix them, you get green paint. But if you take blue light and yellow light and mix them, you get white light. This is a shock to most people.
There is an idea, first of all, of vision fully formed with the eyes closed. Of course the vision we have in a lucid dream often has greater lucidity and clarity than vision with the eyes open.
If you're not an optimist, forget being an artist.
There was a time when I restored antique planes to support my art habit.
Planets' orbits are elliptical. It's a very pleasing shape.
Each day is a different length of time and that gives a different length to the cusp between light and darkness or darkness and light.
Nowhere in the job description of an artist is the requirement that I must validate your taste.
Color is just in a small area of our vision, and the rest we add with the mind.
Light itself is a revelation.
We're made for the light of a cave and for twilight. Twilight is the time we see best. When we dim the light down, and the pupil opens, feeling comes out of the eye like touch. Then you really can feel colour, and experience it.
Generally, we use light to illuminate other things. I like the thingness, the materiality of light itself. So it feels like it's occupying the space, making a plane, being something that was there, not just passing through. Because light is just passing through. I make these spaces that seem to arrest it for our perception.
We use the vocabulary of light to describe a spiritual experience.
At Roden Crater, I was interested in taking the cultural artifice of art out into the natural surround. I wanted the work to be enfolded in nature in such a way that light from the sun, moon and stars empowered the spaces. I wanted to bring culture to the natural surround as if one was designing a garden.
I know that science is very interested in answers, and I'm just happy with a good question.
I don't want you looking at the light fixture; I want you looking at where light goes. But more than that, I'm interested in the effect of light upon you and your perceptions.
It is only when light is reduced that the pupil opens and feeling goes out of the eyes like touch.
I started out with projected-light works and working indoors, but I'd prepare the walls - by sanding, etcetera - the way you'd prepare a canvas for painting.
In Arizona, we're at 7,000 feet, so we're above half of the world's atmosphere. It's crisp but hard, a side-raking light that can be revealing but doesn't have the softness that maritime air has.
I don't worry about whether anyone knows anything about art.
The wonderful thing about being an artist in L.A. is that there is no taste. There's anarchy of taste, which seems good to me.
When you sit down and see someone play at a piano, you don't think, 'Wow - what a fantastic machine.'
I've always wanted to make a light that looks like the light you see in your dream.
Drake went through my exhibition. I did meet him in Los Angeles, and he was in the spaces that I did do there, and has some images from that.
Usually we are illuminating things instead of looking at the light itself. But I like this quality of the light being the revelation.
I have high expectations of my audience, and in general, I would say they've met that.
The Quakers don't believe in music or art; they think it's a vanity.
I come from L.A. where there's a sense of show. But that's not a bad word in my mind. We say art 'show,' don't we? 'Show' implies entertainment.
I like to use light as a material, but my medium is actually perception. I want you to sense yourself sensing - to see yourself seeing.
I don't know if I believe in art. I certainly believe in light.
This idea that light plays an important part in our life is important to me.
Light knows when you're looking at it.
One of the tenets in Quaker meditation is that you 'go inside to greet the light.' I am interested in this light that's inside greeting the light that's outside.
My art has no object, no image, no point of focus.
From the very beginning, I was very interested just in light, and art seemed to be a way to work with it.
There's traditionally been a large disconnection in contemporary art between the audience and the artist. Generally, audiences are looking towards what they like, and I can tell you, that's the last thing on an artist's mind.
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.
We have spent billions to go to the moon - we go to this lesser satellite called the moon and say we are in space, but we are in space right now; we just don't feel ourselves to be in space. Some forms of art and some forms of spirituality do give us that sense.
If you think about art, if you look at Rembrandt and Vermeer and Caravaggio, if you look at Turner and Constable and all the Impressionists and the Hudson River School, there's a tradition of light in art, especially painting.
I come from a family that does not believe in art to this day. They think art is vanity.
In age of consumerism and materialism, I traffic in blue sky and colored air.
This wonderful elixir of light is the thing that actually connects the immaterial with the material - that connects the cosmic to the plain everyday existence that we try to live in.
My mother did not have a toaster oven and would toast bread in the oven, which I thought was stupid. They didn't do cars and electricity, that kind of stuff.
I am interested in relating the things we see with the things we see with our eyes closed.
Sometimes I'm kind of cranky coming to see something. I saw the Mona Lisa when it was in L.A., saw it for 13 seconds and had to move on.
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