James Turrell Quotes

I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.

Sometimes I really want to paint somebody and I don't get a photograph that I want to work from.

I read things and imagine them and then kind of start trying to kind of take what I imagine and make it visual for everybody else to see. It just happens to be my personal vision, and every person's is going to be different, every book reader.

No one can ever create art, even on a piece of paper, as they have envisioned it in their mind.

I'm useless at staring at a piece of white paper. But if you put a piece of white paper with a black line on it in front of me, I'll say no that black line should be red and it should go this way or that way.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That's art to me.

One must always draw, draw with the eyes, when one cannot draw with a pencil.

The pictures I make come from every blink of my lashes.

The crucial discovery was made that, in order to become painting, the universe seen by the artist had to become a private one created by himself.

You can turn something into art just because of the way you tell people to look at it.

If only someone else could paint what I see, it would be marvellous, because then I wouldn't have to paint at all.

To put down an ideogram of a table so that people will recognize it as a table is not the work of a painter, but to sense it for a moment as a magic carpet with a leg hanging down at each corner is the beginning of a painter's imagination.

In my mind's eye, I visualize how a particular... sight and feeling will appear on a print. If it excites me, there is a good chance it will make a good photograph. It is an intuitive sense, an ability that comes from a lot of practice.

I'm a comic book writer, so I work with a lot of artists. Sometimes, you get art back, and you're like, 'Oh, no.' Sometimes, you get art back and you're like, 'That's exactly what I imagined in my head,' and you're happy about that.

It is probably like an artist. They see in their head what they want to draw, and they draw it. It is like I have a feeling inside me that I want to create on a horse, and that is what I do.

I just see potential in things that aren't there and how it's going to make you feel. Like, if it makes me feel a certain way, I try and create the vibe of how that felt to me. And try and create it for someone else.

Picturing things, taking a view, is what makes us human; art is making sense and giving shape to that sense. It is like the religious search for God.

It is important that the painting can be inhabited, so that the mind's eye, or the eye's mind, can move about it credibly.

The photographer, like an acrobat, must defy the laws of probability or even of possibility; at the limit, he must defy those of the interesting: the photograph becomes surprising when we do not know why it has been taken.

Only through art can we get outside of ourselves and know another's view of the universe which is not the same as ours and see landscapes which otherwise would remain unknown to us like the landscapes of the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see it multiply until we have before us as many worlds as there are original artists.

Art is a never-ending dance of illusions.

Take a quart of nature, boil it down to a pint, and the residue is art.

Part of the reason that these attempts at explanation fail, I think, is that photographers, like all artists, choose their medium because it allows them the most fully truthful expression of their vision... as Robert Frost told a person who asked him what one of his poems meant, 'You want me to say it worse?'

Carved with figures strange and sweet, All made out of the carver's brain.