Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My desire is to set up a situation to which I take you and let you see. It becomes your experience.
I wanted the light to be the revelation. It has to do with what we value. I want people to treasure light.
I've always been interested in arrival, and coming to a space, and even to looking back at where you were.
One way to understand light in the ocean of air is by flying it. Life in the air is an extension of perceiving.
I look at light as a material. It is physical. It is photons. Yes, it exhibits wave behavior, but it is a thing.
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.
I haven't been that great at attending my own openings. Still, I'm learning to enjoy this a lot more than I used to.
I have made things for Calvin Klein and other designers, and it's interesting to see the way each person approaches it.
To some degree, to control light, I have to have a way to form it, so I use form almost like the stretcher bar of a canvas.
The cardones cactus is very similar to saguaro cactus in Arizona. These cacti only grow in very specific, particular places.
The wonderful thing about being an artist in L.A. is that there is no taste. There's anarchy of taste, which seems good to me.
I like when you feel like you arrive in a very different place, with a different ordering of the reality you normally think of.
Usually we are illuminating things instead of looking at the light itself. But I like this quality of the light being the revelation.
Space has a way of looking. It seems like it has a presence of vision. When you come into it, it is there, it’s been waiting for you.
I used to think that only people who were crazy were attracted to the desert, but once you've lived there, you become that way anyway.
Each day is a different length of time and that gives a different length to the cusp between light and darkness or darkness and light.
I like to use light as a material, but my medium is actually perception. I want you to sense yourself sensing - to see yourself seeing.
I want to create an atmosphere that can be consciously plumbed with seeing, like the wordless thought that comes from looking in a fire.
I feel my work is made for one being, one individual. You could say that's me, but that's not really true. It's for an idealized viewer.
Sometimes I'm kind of cranky coming to see something. I saw the Mona Lisa when it was in L.A., saw it for 13 seconds and had to move on.
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.
There's truth in light. You can tell what elements a star is composed of and the temperature at which it burns by the light it gives off.
I want to create an atmosphere that can be consciously plumbed with seeing... like the wordless thought that comes from looking in a fire.
Remember technology does not make good work. You can still write a poem on a brown paper bag, and haiku is just as profound as the pyramids.
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.
I'm known as a light artist. But rather than be someone who depicted light, or painted light in some way, I wanted to have the work be light.
Light is a powerful substance. We have a primal connection to it. But, for something so powerful, situations for its felt presence are fragile.
I feel that buildings often have a workaday aspect that you see during the daylight hours, and a more resplendent side that emerges after dark.
I come from L.A. where there's a sense of show. But that's not a bad word in my mind. We say art 'show,' don't we? 'Show' implies entertainment.
You can't stop demographics. And show me a fence that ever worked. It didn't work at Hadrian's Wall. The Great Wall of China didn't work. The Berlin Wall.
I started out with projected-light works and working indoors, but I'd prepare the walls - by sanding, etcetera - the way you'd prepare a canvas for painting.
My mother did not have a toaster oven and would toast bread in the oven, which I thought was stupid. They didn't do cars and electricity, that kind of stuff.
I've always felt that night doesn't fall. Night rises. There are these incidences in flying where you just sit there. It's one of the best seats in the house.
One of the tenets in Quaker meditation is that you 'go inside to greet the light.' I am interested in this light that's inside greeting the light that's outside.
I would describe Los Angeles as actually not having taste. In New York, there's taste. But you have to remember that taste is censorship. It's a form of restriction.
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.
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.
I don't want you looking at the light fixture; I want you looking at where light goes. But more than that, I'm interested in the effect of light upon you and your perceptions.
There are different stages when you fly. The first stage is the dollhouse effect, seeing everything on Earth like it's a model. Suddenly, all of your concerns seem very small.
I like illusion when it is so convincing that we might as well see reality this way - I like to present to our belief system something that is convincing, that 'we know not to be.'
This wonderful elixir of light is the thing that actually connects the immaterial with the material - that connects the cosmic to the plain everyday existence that we try to live in.
The people in L.A. do orient themselves to light. I used to call it 'Tan Fascist Culture.' Everyone there is tanned, wears dark sunglasses, looks like a movie star even when they're not.
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 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.
There is an idea, first of all, of vision fully formed with the eyes closed. Of course the vision we have in a lucid dream often has greater lucidity and clarity than vision with the eyes open.
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.
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.
I've always thought of Las Vegas as Los Angeles on its day off. There's not any hierarchy of taste, and that's what L.A. always was to me: It's not really a town of culture - it's a town of entertainment.
I make spaces that apprehend light for our perception, and in some ways gather it, or seem to hold it...my work is more about your seeing than it is about my seeing, although it is a product of my seeing.
It's difficult for people to visualize from my drawings what it's going to be, so I often find myself talking them into things that they go along with, and when they see what's been made, they are surprised.