Artist Quotes
Find one of the best and famous quote catagorized into topics like inspirational, motivations, deep, thoughtful, art, success, passion, frindship, life, love and many more.
I've always been interested in arrival, and coming to a space, and even to looking back at where you were.
Quote by -James Turrell
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.
Quote by -James Turrell
I'm working to bring celestial objects like the sun and moon into the spaces that we inhabit.
Quote by -James Turrell
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.
Quote by -James Turrell
Nowhere in the job description of an artist is the requirement that I must validate your taste.
Quote by -James Turrell
We think we receive all that we perceive, but in fact, we actually give the sky its colour.
Quote by -James Turrell
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.
Quote by -James Turrell
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.
Quote by -James Turrell
One way to understand light in the ocean of air is by flying it. Life in the air is an extension of perceiving.
Quote by -James Turrell
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.
Quote by -James Turrell
I am interested in relating the things we see with the things we see with our eyes closed.
Quote by -James Turrell
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.
Quote by -James Turrell
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.
Quote by -James Turrell
I have high expectations of my audience, and in general, I would say they've met that.
Quote by -James Turrell
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.
Quote by -James Turrell
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.
Quote by -James Turrell
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.
Quote by -James Turrell
This idea that light plays an important part in our life is important to me.
Quote by -James Turrell
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.
Quote by -James Turrell
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.
Quote by -James Turrell
My desire is to bring astronomical events and objects down into your personal, lived-in space.
Quote by -James Turrell
I come from a family that does not believe in art to this day. They think art is vanity.
Quote by -James Turrell
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.
Quote by -James Turrell
The cardones cactus is very similar to saguaro cactus in Arizona. These cacti only grow in very specific, particular places.
Quote by -James Turrell
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.
Quote by -James Turrell
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.
Quote by -James Turrell
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.
Quote by -James Turrell
There are very few religious experiences that aren't explained using the vocabulary of light.
Quote by -James Turrell
There is an idea, first of all, of vision fully formed with the eyes closed. Of course the vision we have in a lucid dream often has greater lucidity and clarity than vision with the eyes open.
Quote by -James Turrell
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.'
Quote by -James Turrell
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.
Quote by -James Turrell
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.
Quote by -James Turrell
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.
Quote by -James Turrell
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.
Quote by -James Turrell
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.
Quote by -James Turrell
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.
Quote by -James Turrell
When you sit down and see someone play at a piano, you don't think, 'Wow - what a fantastic machine.'
Quote by -James Turrell