Top 132 Quotes & Sayings by James Turrell - Page 2

There are different stages when you fly. The first stage is the dollhouse effect, seeing everything on Earth like it's a model. Suddenly, all of your concerns seem very small.

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.

It's possible to gather light that's older than our solar system.

I'm working to bring celestial objects like the sun and moon into the spaces that we inhabit.

It's difficult for people to visualize from my drawings what it's going to be, so I often find myself talking them into things that they go along with, and when they see what's been made, they are surprised.

I was waiting for L.A. to always become something important. I gave up... I left in 1974.

We're part of creating this world in which we live, but we're unaware of how we do that or even that we do that.

I look at light as a material. It is physical. It is photons. Yes, it exhibits wave behavior, but it is a thing.

My desire is to bring astronomical events and objects down into your personal, lived-in space.

The lunar cycle within the solar season: that kind of syncopated rhythm is what life relates to.

I apprehend light - I make events that shape or contain light.

Las Vegas is about distraction.

I've always been interested in arrival, and coming to a space, and even to looking back at where you were.

I wanted to deal with light directly rather than with paint.

I have made things for Calvin Klein and other designers, and it's interesting to see the way each person approaches it.

One way to understand light in the ocean of air is by flying it. Life in the air is an extension of perceiving.

I live in the sky as a pilot, so it has great meaning to me.

Art history is littered with work that involves light.

There's truth in light. You can tell what elements a star is composed of and the temperature at which it burns by the light it gives off.

I haven't been that great at attending my own openings. Still, I'm learning to enjoy this a lot more than I used to.

I am interested in the physicality of light itself.

I feel that buildings often have a workaday aspect that you see during the daylight hours, and a more resplendent side that emerges after dark.

To some degree, to control light, I have to have a way to form it, so I use form almost like the stretcher bar of a canvas.

I'm interested in light. It's a very direct, pragmatic, American, rather naive approach.

My aunt was Frances Hodges, who in the Fifties was the editor of 'Seventeen' and later one of the creators of 'Mademoiselle.' She was my Auntie Mame; she loved culture. She was a Quaker, but she became a milliner against all Quaker logic - they feel that fashion and art are vanities - because she loved fashion.

I don't think my work is about the spiritual life, but it certainly touches on it.

I want people to treasure light.

The cardones cactus is very similar to saguaro cactus in Arizona. These cacti only grow in very specific, particular places.

New York has changed amazingly; it's gentrified everywhere, and it's a much gentler place.

I used to think that only people who were crazy were attracted to the desert, but once you've lived there, you become that way anyway.

There aren't many artists who can feel sorry for me.

It's really terrific to see Pittsburgh recognize the Mattress Factory.

In many cases, if we knew what it would take, we might have thought twice about it, so it's often wonderful that we don't have hindsight.

I always thought that people who live in the desert are a little crazy. It could be that the desert attracts that kind of person, or that after living there, you become that. It doesn't make much difference. But now I've done my 40 years in the desert.

I would describe Los Angeles as actually not having taste. In New York, there's taste. But you have to remember that taste is censorship. It's a form of restriction.

At my first exhibits, people were saying that's just a light on the wall.

There are very few religious experiences that aren't explained using the vocabulary of light.

If you just add all the time, add more and more light, it loses its meaning.

Art does, to some extent, follow economics.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

We create the reality in which we live.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

We eat light, drink it in through our skins

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.

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

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.

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.

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