James Turrell Quotes

Light is not so much something that reveals, as it is itself the revelation.

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.

With no object no image and no focus, what are you looking at? You are looking at you looking.

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.

My desire is to set up a situation to which I take you and let you see. It becomes your experience.

We create the reality in which we live.

Space has a way of looking. It seems like it has a presence of vision. When you come into it, it is there, it’s been waiting for you.

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.

Science strives for answers, but art is happy with a good question.

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.

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.

My works are about light in the sense that light is present and there; the work is made of light. It's not about light or a record of it, but it is light. Light is not so much something that reveals, as it is itself revelation.

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

I like when you feel like you arrive in a very different place, with a different ordering of the reality you normally think of.

I want to create an atmosphere that can be consciously plumbed with seeing, like the wordless thought that comes from looking in a fire.

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.

I wanted the light to be the revelation. It has to do with what we value. I want people to treasure light.

I’m interested that light has thingness itself, so it’s not something that reveals something about other things you’re looking at, but it becomes a revelation in itself.

We eat light, drink it in through our skins

We live within this reality we create, and we're quite unaware of how we create the reality. So the work is often a general koan into how we go about forming this world in which we live, in particular with seeing.

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.

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 that—this idea to go inside to find that light within, literally as well as figuratively.

I’ve always felt that night doesn’t fall. Night rises.

We think of color as a thing that we’re receiving. And if you go into one of the Skyspaces, you can see that it’s possible to change the color of the sky. Now, I obviously don’t change the color of the sky, but I changed the context of vision.

[My work] is using light as a material to influence or affect the medium of perception. 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.