James Turrell Quotes
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If you're not an optimist, forget being an artist.
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Light is a powerful substance. We have a primal connection to it. But, for something so powerful, situations for its felt presence are fragile.
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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.
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I look at light as a material. It is physical. It is photons. Yes, it exhibits wave behavior, but it is a thing.
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I apprehend light - I make events that shape or contain light.
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I was waiting for L.A. to always become something important. I gave up... I left in 1974.
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Planets' orbits are elliptical. It's a very pleasing shape.
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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.
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At my first exhibits, people were saying that's just a light on the wall.
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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.
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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.
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I wanted to deal with light directly rather than with paint.
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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.
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We use the vocabulary of light to describe a spiritual experience.
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In Arizona, we're at 7,000 feet, so we're above half of the world's atmosphere. It's crisp but hard, a side-raking light that can be revealing but doesn't have the softness that maritime air has.
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I hope that when you see my work, you are looking at yourself looking.
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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.
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The Quakers don't believe in music or art; they think it's a vanity.
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We live within this reality we create, and we're quite unaware of how we create the reality.
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Art history is littered with work that involves light.
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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.
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Nowhere in the job description of an artist is the requirement that I must validate your taste.
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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.
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Light knows when you're looking at it.