James Turrell Quotes
-
I've always been interested in arrival, and coming to a space, and even to looking back at where you were.
-
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 look at light as a material. It is physical. It is photons. Yes, it exhibits wave behavior, but it is a thing.
-
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 apprehend light - I make events that shape or contain light.
-
I was waiting for L.A. to always become something important. I gave up... I left in 1974.
-
Light knows when you're looking at it.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Planets' orbits are elliptical. It's a very pleasing shape.
-
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 wanted to deal with light directly rather than with paint.
-
At my first exhibits, people were saying that's just a light on the wall.
-
Art history is littered with work that involves light.
-
We use the vocabulary of light to describe a spiritual experience.
-
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.
-
We live within this reality we create, and we're quite unaware of how we create the reality.
-
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.
-
I hope that when you see my work, you are looking at yourself looking.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The Quakers don't believe in music or art; they think it's a vanity.
-
I'm interested in light. It's a very direct, pragmatic, American, rather naive approach.
-
The lunar cycle within the solar season: that kind of syncopated rhythm is what life relates to.