James Turrell Quotes
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I'm working to bring celestial objects like the sun and moon into the spaces that we inhabit.
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I sell blue sky and coloured air.
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I have high expectations of my audience, and in general, I would say they've met that.
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From the very beginning, I was very interested just in light, and art seemed to be a way to work with it.
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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.
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There aren't many artists who can feel sorry for me.
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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.
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In age of consumerism and materialism, I traffic in blue sky and colored air.
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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.
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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.
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I come from a family that does not believe in art to this day. They think art is vanity.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It is only when light is reduced that the pupil opens and feeling goes out of the eyes like touch.
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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.
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I am interested in relating the things we see with the things we see with our eyes closed.
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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.
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All art is contemporary art because it had to be made when it was now.
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Color is just in a small area of our vision, and the rest we add with the mind.
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I live in the sky as a pilot, so it has great meaning to me.
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I haven't been that great at attending my own openings. Still, I'm learning to enjoy this a lot more than I used to.
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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.
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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.