122 Quotes by James Turrell

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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’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.

Remember technology does not make good work. You can still write a poem on a brown paper bag, and haiku is just as profound as the pyramids.