Quotes from James Turrell

Art history is littered with work that involves light.

Light itself is a revelation.

If you take blue paint and yellow paint and you mix them, you get green paint. But if you take blue light and yellow light and mix them, you get white light. This is a shock to most people.

I want people to treasure light.

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

I sell blue sky and coloured air.

We think we receive all that we perceive, but in fact, we actually give the sky its colour.

The sky always seems to be out there, away from us. I like to bring it down in close contact with us, so you feel you are in it. We feel we are at the bottom of this ocean of air; we are actually on a planet.

I live in the sky as a pilot, so it has great meaning to me.

Light knows when you're looking at it.

I've always wanted to make a light that looks like the light you see in your dream.

In Arizona, we're at 7,000 feet, so we're above half of the world's atmosphere. It's crisp but hard, a side-raking light that can be revealing but doesn't have the softness that maritime air has.

The lunar cycle within the solar season: that kind of syncopated rhythm is what life relates to.

If you think about art, if you look at Rembrandt and Vermeer and Caravaggio, if you look at Turner and Constable and all the Impressionists and the Hudson River School, there's a tradition of light in art, especially painting.

In many cases, if we knew what it would take, we might have thought twice about it, so it's often wonderful that we don't have hindsight.

We're made for the light of a cave and for twilight. Twilight is the time we see best. When we dim the light down, and the pupil opens, feeling comes out of the eye like touch. Then you really can feel colour, and experience it.

There aren't many artists who can feel sorry for me.

Generally, we use light to illuminate other things. I like the thingness, the materiality of light itself. So it feels like it's occupying the space, making a plane, being something that was there, not just passing through. Because light is just passing through. I make these spaces that seem to arrest it for our perception.

Drake went through my exhibition. I did meet him in Los Angeles, and he was in the spaces that I did do there, and has some images from that.

If you just add all the time, add more and more light, it loses its meaning.

We live within this reality we create, and we're quite unaware of how we create the reality.

We're part of creating this world in which we live, but we're unaware of how we do that or even that we do that.

The cardones cactus is very similar to saguaro cactus in Arizona. These cacti only grow in very specific, particular places.

I don't think my work is about the spiritual life, but it certainly touches on it.