Top 26 James Turrell Quotes

#1. 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.

James Turrell

James Turrell Quotes #56571
#2. Light is not so much something that reveals, as it is itself the revelation.

James Turrell

James Turrell Quotes #91597
#3. 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.

James Turrell

James Turrell Quotes #118820
#4. When you're O.C.D., you want the most beautiful animals.

James Turrell

James Turrell Quotes #214539
#5. I like when you feel like you arrive in a very different place, with a different ordering of the reality you normally think of.

James Turrell

James Turrell Quotes #244036
#6. Science strives for answers, but art is happy with a good question.

James Turrell

James Turrell Quotes #274385
#7. I wanted the light to be the revelation. It has to do with what we value. I want people to treasure light.

James Turrell

James Turrell Quotes #288062
#8. 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.

James Turrell

James Turrell Quotes #311659
#9. 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.

James Turrell

James Turrell Quotes #645159
#10. I want to create an atmosphere that can be consciously plumbed with seeing, like the wordless thought that comes from looking in a fire.

James Turrell

James Turrell Quotes #738056
#11. 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.

James Turrell

James Turrell Quotes #741514
#12. 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.

James Turrell

James Turrell Quotes #755261
#13. 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.

James Turrell

James Turrell Quotes #862225
#14. 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.

James Turrell

James Turrell Quotes #876440
#15. 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.

James Turrell

James Turrell Quotes #1055215
#16. I am not an Earth artist, I'm totally involved in the sky.

James Turrell

James Turrell Quotes #1131700
#17. 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.

James Turrell

James Turrell Quotes #1221071
#18. 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.

James Turrell

James Turrell Quotes #1274542
#19. With no object no image and no focus, what are you looking at? You are looking at you looking.

James Turrell

James Turrell Quotes #1365658
#20. 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.

James Turrell

James Turrell Quotes #1392903
#21. 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.

James Turrell

James Turrell Quotes #1394395
#22. 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.

James Turrell

James Turrell Quotes #1585831
#23. [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.

James Turrell

James Turrell Quotes #1641058
#24. It was important that people come to value light as we value gold, silver, paintings, objects.

James Turrell

James Turrell Quotes #1650398
#25. My desire is to set up a situation to which I take you and let you see. It becomes your experience.

James Turrell

James Turrell Quotes #1753164
#26. We create the reality in which we live.

James Turrell

James Turrell Quotes #1757808

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