Top 34 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
#2. Light is not so much something that reveals, as it is itself the revelation.
James Turrell
#4. 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
#5. When you're O.C.D., you want the most beautiful animals.
James Turrell
#6. 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
#7. Science strives for answers, but art is happy with a good question.
James Turrell
#8. I wanted the light to be the revelation. It has to do with what we value. I want people to treasure light.
James Turrell
#9. Baseball has done more to move America in the right direction than all of the professional patriots with all their cheap words.
Monte Irvin
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#18. What makes me most happy is connecting with others. I love meeting new people, being social, and engaging in empowering discussions.
Gabrielle Bernstein
#19. In our complex world, there cannot be fruitful initiative without government, but unfortunately there can be government without initiative.
Bertrand Russell
#20. 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
#21. I am not an Earth artist, I'm totally involved in the sky.
James Turrell
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. Now you must excuse your Raja for he must suffer to give audience to the prince of Punt, a pompous old fool, who believes that his frequent flatulencies are the echoes of the Gods applauding his non sequiturs.
Piers Anthony
#25. With no object no image and no focus, what are you looking at? You are looking at you looking.
James Turrell
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. When, from the top of any high hill, one looks round the country, and sees the multitude of regularly distributed spires, one not only ceases to wonder that order and religion are maintained, but one is astonished that any such thing as disaffection or irreligion should prevail.
William Cobbett
#29. 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
#30. [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
#31. It was important that people come to value light as we value gold, silver, paintings, objects.
James Turrell
#32. My desire is to set up a situation to which I take you and let you see. It becomes your experience.
James Turrell
#34. Love, and a cough, are not concealed.
Ovid
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