James Turrell Quotes

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

Light knows when you're looking at it.

Light is not so much something that reveals, as it is itself the revelation.

My works are about light in the sense that light is present and there; the work is made of light. It's not about light or a record of it, but it is light. Light is not so much something that reveals, as it is itself revelation.

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.

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

A rooster crows only when it sees the light. Put him in the dark and he'll never crow. I have seen the light and I'm crowing.

To love beauty is to see light.

I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may, - light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful.

Usually we are illuminating things instead of looking at the light itself. But I like this quality of the light being the revelation.

The fascinating thing, is not to show the source of light, but the effect of light.

I wanted the light to be the revelation. It has to do with what we value. I want people to treasure light.

Let the ugly light of the world in, we are no longer blind.

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

Those things that are in the light we behold from darkness.

As the eye is the best composer, so light is the first of painters. There is no object so foul that intense light will not make beautiful; and the stimulus it affords to the sense, and a sort of infinitude which it hath like space and time, make all matter gay.

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.

The instant the atmosphere is illuminated it will be filled with an infinite number of images which are produced by the various bodies and colours assembled in it. And the eye is the target, a lodestone, of these images.

Critic asks: 'And what, sir, is the subject matter of that painting?' - 'The subject matter, my dear good fellow, is the light.

Remember...we don't see objects, we see light. [...] Light can do anything water can do--flow, wash, trickle. It can do anything an artist can do--paint, burnish, carve. Candlelight falls, licks a face. There is always light in a room.

My function in life was to render clear what was already blindingly conspicuous.

He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light than his perishing and mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all.

What are the sources of an illumination? To me, they come after hours of searching and keeping my soul ready. Yet they come in a flash, as a religious phenomenon. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter had such an illumination, beginning my long search for the truth of the story and flashing light into the long two years ahead.

It is not the object described that matters, but the light that falls on it.

[On the] question of why we might want to look at images even more than the real thing: I think there is some quality when you look at an image of, not only seeing this thing, whether it's the horse or the sky, but you are seeing somebody point at it and say, Look!