Top James Turrell Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

James Turrell Biography

James Turrell (born May 6, 1943) is an American artist primarily concerned with light and space. Turrell was a MacArthur Fellow in 1984. Turrell is best known for his work in progress, Roden Crater, a natural cinder cone crater located outside Flagstaff, Arizona that he is turning into a massive naked-eye observatory.

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James Turrell Quotes

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

Focus, Objects, Looking, Image, Object

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

Fall, Felt, Night, Rises

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

Light, Vision, Revelations, Reveals, Revelation

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

Light, People, Treasure, Value, Revelation

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.

Deliciousness, Light, Like, Order, Seeing, Sweet

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

Photography, Art, Creativity, Good, Happy, Science

We eat light, drink it in through our skins

Drink, Eat, Light, Skins

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.

Space, Waiting, Vision, Looking, Like

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

Reality, Thinking, Different, Arrive, Normally

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.

Atmosphere, Dream, Infuses, Light, Rain, Unfamiliar

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.

Light, Records, Painting, Material, Tradition

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.

Apprehend, Creativity, Light, Photography, Spaces, Work

It was important that people come to value light as we value gold, silver, paintings, objects.

Gold, Important, Light, People

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

Becomes, Desire, Experience, See, Situation, Take

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.

Generated, Light, Sense, Sky, Space

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.

Attention, Light, People, Sound, Thinking, Used

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.

Light, Like, Powerful, Primal, Situations, Space

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.

Grandmother, Ideas, Light, Maybe, Said

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

Atmosphere, Create, Design, Fire, Seeing, Wordless

We create the reality in which we live.

Create, Live, Reality

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