A biography for James Turrellhasn’t been written yet.
“One way to understand light in the ocean of air is by flying it. Life in the air is an extension of perceiving.”
“Art does, to some extent, follow economics.”
“I am involved in the architecture of space.”
“I've always wanted to make a light that looks like the light you see in your dream.”
“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.”
“I don't know if I believe in art. I certainly believe in light.”
“It's possible to gather light that's older than our solar system.”
“There aren't many artists who can feel sorry for me.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Art history is littered with work that involves light.”
“Nowhere in the job description of an artist is the requirement that I must validate your taste.”
“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.”
“I'm working to bring celestial objects like the sun and moon into the spaces that we inhabit.”
“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.”
“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 wanted to deal with light directly rather than with paint.”
“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.”
“If you're not an optimist, forget being an artist.”
“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.”