Top 55 James Turrell Quotes

Nowhere in the job description of an artist is the requirement that I must validate your taste.

I don’t know if I believe in art. I certainly believe in light.

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

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.

All art is contemporary art because it had to be made when it was now.

Color is just in a small area of our vision, and the rest we add with the mind.

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

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 hope that when you see my work, you are looking at yourself looking.

There was a time when I restored antique planes to support my art habit.

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.

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

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.

Art does, to some extent, follow economics.

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.

We think we receive all that we perceive, but in fact, we actually give the sky its colour.

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 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.

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.

This idea that light plays an important part in our life is important to me.

I’ve always wanted to make a light that looks like the light you see in your dream.

Art history is littered with work that involves light.

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.

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.

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

I sell blue sky and coloured air.

It is only when light is reduced that the pupil opens and feeling goes out of the eyes like touch.

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.

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.

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

When you sit down and see someone play at a piano, you don’t think, ‘Wow – what a fantastic machine.’

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.

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

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.

My art has no object, no image, no point of focus.

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

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

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

Planets‘ orbits are elliptical. It’s a very pleasing shape.

I come from a family that does not believe in art to this day. They think art is 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.

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’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.

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 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.

I know that science is very interested in answers, and I’m just happy with a good question.

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.

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.

In age of consumerism and materialism, I traffic in blue sky and colored air.

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 don’t worry about whether anyone knows anything about art.

I am involved in the architecture of space.

Usually we are illuminating things instead of looking at the light itself. But I like this quality of the light being the revelation.

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

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