In age of consumerism and materialism, I traffic in blue sky and colored air.
James Turrell
I sell blue sky and coloured air.
James Turrell
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.
James Turrell
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.
James Turrell
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.
James Turrell
Usually we are illuminating things instead of looking at the light itself. But I like this quality of the light being the revelation.
James Turrell
There are very few religious experiences that aren’t explained using the vocabulary of light.
James Turrell
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.
James Turrell
I apprehend light – I make events that shape or contain light.
James Turrell
All art is contemporary art because it had to be made when it was now.
James Turrell
Color is just in a small area of our vision, and the rest we add with the mind.
James Turrell
It’s possible to gather light that’s older than our solar system.
James Turrell
We live within this reality we create, and we’re quite unaware of how we create the reality.
James Turrell
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.
James Turrell
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.
James Turrell
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.
James Turrell
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.
James Turrell
I’m working to bring celestial objects like the sun and moon into the spaces that we inhabit.
James Turrell
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.
James Turrell
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.
James Turrell
Nowhere in the job description of an artist is the requirement that I must validate your taste.
James Turrell
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.
James Turrell
Art history is littered with work that involves light.
James Turrell
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.
James Turrell
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.
James Turrell
Light itself is a revelation.
James Turrell
I’ve always wanted to make a light that looks like the light you see in your dream.
James Turrell
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.
James Turrell
The Quakers don’t believe in music or art; they think it’s a vanity.
James Turrell
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.
James Turrell
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.
James Turrell
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
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.
James Turrell
Light itself is a revelation.
James Turrell
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.
James Turrell
I look at light as a material. It is physical. It is photons. Yes, it exhibits wave behavior, but it is a thing.
James Turrell
I’ve always been interested in arrival, and coming to a space, and even to looking back at where you were.
James Turrell
I don’t worry about whether anyone knows anything about art.
James Turrell
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.
James Turrell
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.
James Turrell
I am interested in relating the things we see with the things we see with our eyes closed.
James Turrell
It is only when light is reduced that the pupil opens and feeling goes out of the eyes like touch.
James Turrell
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.’
James Turrell
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.
James Turrell
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.
James Turrell
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.
James Turrell
My art has no object, no image, no point of focus.
James Turrell
Light is a powerful substance. We have a primal connection to it. But, for something so powerful, situations for its felt presence are fragile.
James Turrell
I come from a family that does not believe in art to this day. They think art is vanity.
James Turrell
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.
James Turrell
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
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.
James Turrell