James Turrell Quotes

You get a painting idea, and you go do that. You get a cinema idea, and you go in to do that. The difference is, even though the paintings might take some time to make, with cinema you are booked for a year and a half, minimum.

My painting does not come from the easel.

But I think that's a particular kind of experience involving a certain immediacy between you and the canvass, you and the particular kind of experience of that particular moment.

He tosses aside his paint-pots and his words a foot and a half long.

The things that I paint are things that I know very well.

David is purely a conceptual artist. He didn't play any instruments or paint or anything. We were painters.

Photography is about finding things. And painting is different - it's about making something.

Painting is a lonely, mostly solitary act.

I don't see myself as a photographer. I still see the photographs and collages as a resource for the painting.

All I care about these days is painting — photography has never been more than a way into painting, a sort of instant drawing.

Painting is something that takes place among the colors.

Painting is something that requires a lot of time - it's not just one good idea out of art school.

Painting seems like some kind of peculiar miracle that I need to have again and again.

I felt I was painting with a Popsicle.

All my paintings are usually done in drawing form, very small. I make notations in drawings first, and then I make a collage for color. But drawing is always my notation.

I paint on the ground. I paint with sticks, with big paint cans, and whatever else falls in it. Basically, what I'm doing is capturing unbridled emotion and putting it on canvas. It's like capturing lightning in a bottle.

Painting is almost like a sport. It's like this action thing. When I do it, I'm really not thinking. The paintings are like a diary that I might not want to read again.

I dream a lot. I do more painting when I'm not painting. It's in the subconscious.

Painting is the frozen evidence of a performance.

I never know what it's going to look like. Wouldn't be much point in painting if I already knew the outcome. I have a subject in front of me and I start flooding colour and making marks, I don't know, it's improvisation isn't it?

Do not think that I have stopped painting, for at any moment, I am liable to paint a good picture.

I think when you work alone - the way I do it, anyway - you could sort of liken it to painting, where there's sort of a one-on-one with the canvas.

I just wanted to paint and sketch and tell stories by drawing.

I don't even think about maintaining a relevance. I just think about what do I want to paint, what am I gonna do now, what am I gonna do later.

Art - be it painting, sculpture, music - they are all creations, they are creative acts. I consider a film, with everything that is involved in it, an art.