James Turrell Quotes

There is actually a physical connection between light and our health and wellbeing.

Light comes to us by the sensibility. Without visual sensibility there is no light, no movement.

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.

Philosophers say that nothing can be seen that is neither illuminated nor colored.

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.

We think of color as a thing that we’re receiving. And if you go into one of the Skyspaces, you can see that it’s possible to change the color of the sky. Now, I obviously don’t change the color of the sky, but I changed the context of vision.

Some are born to sweet delight, Some are born to endless night.

When we sense something, it is due to the movement of atoms in space. When I see the moon it is because "moon atoms" penetrate my eye.

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.

Just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree.

The whole life lies in the verb seeing.

The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space.

I see only forms that are lit up and forms that are not. There is only light and shadow.

Light means nothing to a blind man.

The objective world is the order of nature, thinking or reflection follows the suggestions of sense experience, and words are the servomechanisms of reflection.

Light is, perhaps, the most wonderful of all visible things.

Shut your eyes and you will know what I mean by thought entombed in darkness. Light comes through the senses, and not only through the sense of sight. When you see without feeling, you are still partly blind; you lack the inner light that brings awareness. Awareness requires the interplay of every faculty, the use of your entire being as an eye.

There are dead stars that still shine because their light is trapped in time. Where do I stand in this light, which does not strictly exist? (155)

To have a certain new eight-and-a-hal f-minute-old light from the sun-to feel it physically, almost as we taste things-this is where you can work with light like that.

We are born of light. The seasons are felt through light. We only know the world as it is evoked by light.

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.

Sunshine had never tasted so sweet as it did at that moment.

To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees.

The photographer projects himself into everything he sees, identifying himself with everything in order to know it and to feel it better.