I want people to treasure light.
— James Turrell
Light knows when you're looking at it.
In many cases, if we knew what it would take, we might have thought twice about it, so it's often wonderful that we don't have hindsight.
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.
If you just add all the time, add more and more light, it loses its meaning.
The cardones cactus is very similar to saguaro cactus in Arizona. These cacti only grow in very specific, particular places.
I am interested in relating the things we see with the things we see with our eyes closed.
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.
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.
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.
All art is contemporary art because it had to be made when it was now.
New York has changed amazingly; it's gentrified everywhere, and it's a much gentler place.
I don't know if I believe in art. I certainly believe in light.
I apprehend light - I make events that shape or contain light.
I'm interested in light. It's a very direct, pragmatic, American, rather naive approach.
I have made things for Calvin Klein and other designers, and it's interesting to see the way each person approaches it.
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.
Las Vegas is about distraction.
My desire is to bring astronomical events and objects down into your personal, lived-in space.
The lunar cycle within the solar season: that kind of syncopated rhythm is what life relates to.
I live in the sky as a pilot, so it has great meaning to me.
It is only when light is reduced that the pupil opens and feeling goes out of the eyes like touch.
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.
In age of consumerism and materialism, I traffic in blue sky and colored air.
Art history is littered with work that involves light.
I've always wanted to make a light that looks like the light you see in your dream.
There aren't many artists who can feel sorry for me.
It's really terrific to see Pittsburgh recognize the Mattress Factory.
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.
There are different stages when you fly. The first stage is the dollhouse effect, seeing everything on Earth like it's a model. Suddenly, all of your concerns seem very small.
I'm working to bring celestial objects like the sun and moon into the spaces that we inhabit.
I hope that when you see my work, you are looking at yourself looking.
My aunt was Frances Hodges, who in the Fifties was the editor of 'Seventeen' and later one of the creators of 'Mademoiselle.' She was my Auntie Mame; she loved culture. She was a Quaker, but she became a milliner against all Quaker logic - they feel that fashion and art are vanities - because she loved fashion.
Light itself is a revelation.
It's possible to gather light that's older than our solar system.
From the very beginning, I was very interested just in light, and art seemed to be a way to work with it.
There are very few religious experiences that aren't explained using the vocabulary of light.
Art does, to some extent, follow economics.
I am interested in the physicality of light itself.
One of the tenets in Quaker meditation is that you 'go inside to greet the light.' I am interested in this light that's inside greeting the light that's outside.
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.
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.
I am involved in the architecture of space.
I always thought that people who live in the desert are a little crazy. It could be that the desert attracts that kind of person, or that after living there, you become that. It doesn't make much difference. But now I've done my 40 years in the desert.
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 was waiting for L.A. to always become something important. I gave up... I left in 1974.
There was a time when I restored antique planes to support my art habit.
One way to understand light in the ocean of air is by flying it. Life in the air is an extension of perceiving.
Color is just in a small area of our vision, and the rest we add with the mind.
