James Turrell famous quotes

04-28-2025

I am not an Earth artist, I'm totally involved in the sky.
-- James Turrell

#Artist #Sky #Earth
Space has a way of looking. It seems like it has a presence of vision. When you come into it, it is there, itâ€™s been waiting for you.
-- James Turrell

#Space #Waiting #Vision
My work is about your seeing. There is a rich tradition in painting of work about light, but it is not light -- it is the record of seeing. My material is light, and it is responsive to your seeing.
-- James Turrell

#Light #Records #Painting
Light is not so much something that reveals, as it is itself the revelation.
-- James Turrell

#Light #Vision #Revelations
I've always felt that night doesn't fall. Night rises. There are these incidences in flying where you just sit there. It's one of the best seats in the house.
-- James Turrell

#Fall #Night #House
We eat light, drink it in through our skins. With a little more exposure to light, you feel part of things physically. I like feeling the power of light and space physically because then you can order it materially. Seeing is a very sensuous act-there's a sweet deliciousness to feeling yourself see something.
-- James Turrell

#Sweet #Space #Light
We eat light, drink it in through our skins
-- James Turrell

#Light #Skins #Drink
Science strives for answers, but art is happy with a good question.
-- James Turrell

#Photography #Art #Creativity
With no object no image and no focus, what are you looking at? You are looking at you looking.
-- James Turrell

#Focus
Iâ€™m interested that light has thingness itself, so itâ€™s not something that reveals something about other things youâ€™re looking at, but it becomes a revelation in itself.
-- James Turrell

#Light #Revelations
My desire is to set up a situation to which I take you and let you see. It becomes your experience.
-- James Turrell

#Desire #Situation
I always wanted to make a light that looks like the light you see in your dream. Because the way that light infuses the dream, the way the atmosphere is colored, the way light rains off people with auras and things like that...We don't normally see light like that. But we all know it. So this is no unfamiliar territory - or not unfamiliar light. I like to have this kind of light that reminds us of this other place we know.
-- James Turrell

#Dream #Rain #Light
I make spaces that apprehend light for our perception, and in some ways gather it, or seem to hold it...my work is more about your seeing than it is about my seeing, although it is a product of my seeing.
-- James Turrell

#Light #Space #Perception
I'm known as a light artist. But rather than be someone who depicted light, or painted light in some way, I wanted to have the work be light.
-- James Turrell

#Artist #Light #Way
I was maybe 5 or 6, and my grandmother would begin sitting me in the Quaker meeting house. I asked my grandmother, 'What am I supposed to do?' and she said, 'Just wait, we're going inside to greet the light.' I liked thatâ€”this idea to go inside to find that light within, literally as well as figuratively.
-- James Turrell

#Grandmother #Light #Ideas
We create the reality in which we live.
-- James Turrell

#Reality
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 like to work with it so that you feel it physically, so you feel the presence of light inhabiting a space.
-- James Turrell

#Powerful #Light #Space
It was important that people come to value light as we value gold, silver, paintings, objects.
-- James Turrell

#Light #People #Important
When youâ€™re O.C.D., you want the most beautiful animals.
-- James Turrell

#Beautiful #Animal #Want
We think of color as a thing that weâ€™re receiving. And if you go into one of the Skyspaces, you can see that itâ€™s possible to change the color of the sky. Now, I obviously donâ€™t change the color of the sky, but I changed the context of vision.
-- James Turrell

#Thinking #Color #Sky
In thinking of light, if we can think about what it can do, and what it is, by thinking about itself, not about what we wanted it to do for other things, because again we've used light as people might be used, in the sense that we use it to light paintings. We use it to light so that we can read. We don't really pay much attention to the light itself. And so turning that and letting light and sound speak for itself is that you figure out these different relationships and rules.
-- James Turrell

#Thinking #Light #People
Remember technology does not make good work. You can still write a poem on a brown paper bag, and haiku is just as profound as the pyramids.
-- James Turrell

#Writing #Technology #Pyramids
Iâ€™ve always felt that night doesnâ€™t fall. Night rises.
-- James Turrell

#Fall #Night
To have a certain new eight-and-a-hal f-minute-old light from the sun-to feel it physically, almost as we taste things-this is where you can work with light like that.
-- James Turrell

#Eight #Light #Taste
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

#Fire #Design #Atmosphere
The sky is no longer out there, but it is right on the edge of the space you are in. The sense of colour is generated inside you. If you then go outside you will see a different coloured sky. You colour the sky.
-- James Turrell

#Light #Sky #Space
I wanted the light to be the revelation. It has to do with what we value. I want people to treasure light.
-- James Turrell

#Light #People #Treasure
The Meeting is actually like the Gunpowder Meeting, or some of the earlier American Quaker MeetingsThe long house form is something that was traditionthat's what I started with as an idea. But then making this in terms of the sizing and the use that was asked for by Live Oak Meeting- I mean it's a very traditional form, except it's convertible. The top opens, and it makes a sky space where sky is really brought down to you; your awareness of it is made quite different. It was a little bit of a novel idea, that it's a roof that opens.
-- James Turrell

#Mean #Sky #Ideas

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