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.
James Turrell
In age of consumerism and materialism, I traffic in blue sky and colored air.
I sell blue sky and coloured air.
Light knows when you're looking at it.
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.
It is only when light is reduced that the pupil opens and feeling goes out of the eyes like touch.
We live within this reality we create, and we're quite unaware of how we create the reality.
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.
All art is contemporary art because it had to be made when it was now.
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 use light as a material, but my medium is actually perception. I want you to sense yourself sensing - to see yourself seeing.
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 am interested in relating the things we see with the things we see with our eyes closed.
Light itself is a revelation.
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.
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.
Art history is littered with work that involves light.
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.
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.
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.
My art has no object, no image, no point of focus.
Nowhere in the job description of an artist is the requirement that I must validate your taste.
When you sit down and see someone play at a piano, you don't think, 'Wow - what a fantastic machine.'
I don't worry about whether anyone knows anything about art.
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.
There was a time when I restored antique planes to support my art habit.
It's really terrific to see Pittsburgh recognize the Mattress Factory.
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.
We think we receive all that we perceive, but in fact, we actually give the sky its colour.
There are very few religious experiences that aren't explained using the vocabulary of light.
I don't know if I believe in art. I certainly believe in light.
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.
I'm working to bring celestial objects like the sun and moon into the spaces that we inhabit.
This idea that light plays an important part in our life is important to me.
There aren't many artists who can feel sorry for me.
I've always been interested in arrival, and coming to a space, and even to looking back at where you were.
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.
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.
At my first exhibits, people were saying that's just a light on the wall.
The cardones cactus is very similar to saguaro cactus in Arizona. These cacti only grow in very specific, particular places.
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 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.
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.
One way to understand light in the ocean of air is by flying it. Life in the air is an extension of perceiving.
I want people to treasure light.
My desire is to bring astronomical events and objects down into your personal, lived-in space.
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.
We use the vocabulary of light to describe a spiritual experience.
I come from a family that does not believe in art to this day. They think art is vanity.
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.
