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.
— James Turrell
I don't worry about whether anyone knows anything about art.
I look at light as a material. It is physical. It is photons. Yes, it exhibits wave behavior, but it is a thing.
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.
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.
At my first exhibits, people were saying that's just a light on the wall.
There's truth in light. You can tell what elements a star is composed of and the temperature at which it burns by the light it gives off.
Generally, we use light to illuminate other things. I like the thingness, the materiality of light itself. So it feels like it's occupying the space, making a plane, being something that was there, not just passing through. Because light is just passing through. I make these spaces that seem to arrest it for our perception.
The Quakers don't believe in music or art; they think it's a vanity.
If you're not an optimist, forget being an artist.
I come from L.A. where there's a sense of show. But that's not a bad word in my mind. We say art 'show,' don't we? 'Show' implies entertainment.
I have high expectations of my audience, and in general, I would say they've met that.
My mother did not have a toaster oven and would toast bread in the oven, which I thought was stupid. They didn't do cars and electricity, that kind of stuff.
I like to work with it so that you feel it physically, so you feel the presence of light inhabiting a space. My desire is to set up a situation to which I take you and let you see. It becomes your experience.
My art has no object, no image, no point of focus.
I feel my work is made for one being, one individual. You could say that's me, but that's not really true. It's for an idealized viewer.
I like illusion when it is so convincing that we might as well see reality this way - I like to present to our belief system something that is convincing, that 'we know not to be.'
Usually we are illuminating things instead of looking at the light itself. But I like this quality of the light being the revelation.
I've always thought of Las Vegas as Los Angeles on its day off. There's not any hierarchy of taste, and that's what L.A. always was to me: It's not really a town of culture - it's a town of entertainment.
If you take blue paint and yellow paint and you mix them, you get green paint. But if you take blue light and yellow light and mix them, you get white light. This is a shock to most people.
I feel that buildings often have a workaday aspect that you see during the daylight hours, and a more resplendent side that emerges after dark.
I sell blue sky and coloured air.
Planets' orbits are elliptical. It's a very pleasing shape.
We're made for the light of a cave and for twilight. Twilight is the time we see best. When we dim the light down, and the pupil opens, feeling comes out of the eye like touch. Then you really can feel colour, and experience it.
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.
I know that science is very interested in answers, and I'm just happy with a good question.
Nowhere in the job description of an artist is the requirement that I must validate your taste.
This idea that light plays an important part in our life is important to me.
The works of previous artists have come from their own experiences or insights but haven't given the experience itself. They had set themselves up as a sort of interpreter to the layman... Our interest is in a form where you realize that the media are just perception.
I come from a family that does not believe in art to this day. They think art is vanity.
At Roden Crater, I was interested in taking the cultural artifice of art out into the natural surround. I wanted the work to be enfolded in nature in such a way that light from the sun, moon and stars empowered the spaces. I wanted to bring culture to the natural surround as if one was designing a garden.
Drake went through my exhibition. I did meet him in Los Angeles, and he was in the spaces that I did do there, and has some images from that.
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.
The people in L.A. do orient themselves to light. I used to call it 'Tan Fascist Culture.' Everyone there is tanned, wears dark sunglasses, looks like a movie star even when they're not.
I've always been interested in arrival, and coming to a space, and even to looking back at where you were.
We live within this reality we create, and we're quite unaware of how we create the reality.
I don't think my work is about the spiritual life, but it certainly touches on it.
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.
I wanted to deal with light directly rather than with paint.
I would describe Los Angeles as actually not having taste. In New York, there's taste. But you have to remember that taste is censorship. It's a form of restriction.
We think we receive all that we perceive, but in fact, we actually give the sky its colour.
This wonderful elixir of light is the thing that actually connects the immaterial with the material - that connects the cosmic to the plain everyday existence that we try to live in.
The wonderful thing about being an artist in L.A. is that there is no taste. There's anarchy of taste, which seems good to me.
When you sit down and see someone play at a piano, you don't think, 'Wow - what a fantastic machine.'
I want to create an atmosphere that can be consciously plumbed with seeing... like the wordless thought that comes from looking in a fire.
There's traditionally been a large disconnection in contemporary art between the audience and the artist. Generally, audiences are looking towards what they like, and I can tell you, that's the last thing on an artist's mind.
Light is a powerful substance. We have a primal connection to it. But, for something so powerful, situations for its felt presence are fragile.
Sometimes I'm kind of cranky coming to see something. I saw the Mona Lisa when it was in L.A., saw it for 13 seconds and had to move on.
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.
