James Turrell Quotes

You don't paint pictures to put them in your attic. You want people to look at them.

The character of the artist doesn't enter into the nature of the art.

An artist cannot be responsible for what people make of their art. An audience loathe giving up preconceived images of an artist.

Art can never exist without naked beauty displayed.

I think too many people look at the arts with a religious outlook. Arts, music, singing and performing, it's all make-believe.

I looked at Rembrandt and Superman, Matisse and Bugs Bunny, and began to make my own pictures.

Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms.

It is not an aesthetic misstep to make the viewer aware of the paint and the painter's hand. Such an empathetic awareness lies at the heart of aesthetic appreciation.

Being able to take musical ideas through every iteration is attractive to me. Granted, not everyone's going to want to listen to that, but it should exist.

Art is man's constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.

It is conceivable that what is unified form to the author or composer may of necessity be formless to his audience.

Giorgio Morandi's paintings make me think that artists may not totally choose, or even control, their subjects or style.

You can't make a perfect painting. We can see perfection in our minds. But we can't make a perfect painting.

Museums are for dead artists. I'd never show my work in the Tate. You'd never get me in that place.

The first mistake of art is to assume that it's serious.

The critic has to educate the public; the artist has to educate the critic.

Technique is really personality. That is the reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the aesthetic critic can understand it.

Someone who is an artist can say, 'I can create and can make what I create disappear.'

I consider myself first of all an artist. My work is about my creativity - why I create and not for whom.

I think people should just make art and let the art speak for itself.

Everything about art has become problematic; its inner life, its relation to society, even its right to exist.

The sculptor does not work for the anatomist, but for the common observer of life and nature.

I wonder if the artist ever lives his life--he is so busy recreating it.

An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty.

Each artist comes to the painting or sculpture because there he can be told that he, the individual, transcends all classes and flouts all predictions. In the work of art, he finds his uniqueness confirmed.