A biography for James Turrellhasn’t been written yet.
“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.”
“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.”
“I have made things for Calvin Klein and other designers, and it's interesting to see the way each person approaches it.”
“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.”
“I've always been interested in arrival, and coming to a space, and even to looking back at where you were.”
“I am interested in relating the things we see with the things we see with our eyes closed.”
“All art is contemporary art because it had to be made when it was now.”
“I don't worry about whether anyone knows anything about art.”
“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.”
“There was a time when I restored antique planes to support my art habit.”
“Color is just in a small area of our vision, and the rest we add with the mind.”
“I have high expectations of my audience, and in general, I would say they've met that.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I am interested in the physicality of light itself.”
“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.”
“In age of consumerism and materialism, I traffic in blue sky and colored air.”
“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'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.”
“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.”