I wanted to deal with light directly rather than with paint.
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Mixing colors in paint and light yields different results, emphasizing the variance in perception.
This quote by James Turrell highlights the fundamental difference between additive and subtractive color mixing. In the world of pigments, combining blue and yellow results in green due to the way colors absorb and reflect light. Conversely, mixing blue and yellow light creates white light, illustrating the principle of additive color mixing and revealing how our perception of color can be surprising and counterintuitive.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a lecture about color theory, you might say: 'As James Turrell pointed out, mixing blue and yellow light gives you white light, which surprises many people.'
More from James Turrell
All quotes →It is only when light is reduced that the pupil opens and feeling goes out of the eyes like touch.
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.
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 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.
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.
Similar quotes
Doctors can heal the body, but it is music that uplifts the spirit.
They [photographs] teach you about your own unraveling past, or about the immediacy of yesterday. They show you what you look at. If you take a photograph, you've been responsive to something, and you looked hard at it. Hard for a thousandth of a second, hard for ten minutes. But hard, nonetheless. And it's the quality of that bite that teaches you how connected you were to that thing, and where you stood in relation to it, then and now.
I think cooks that are just interested in molecular gastronomy are cooks that will never be chefs.
A human being creates complexity by writing a novel on the surface of paper; a weather system creates complexity by writing waves on the surface of an ocean. What is the difference between the information carried in the words of a novel and the information carried on the waves of the sea? Listen, and the waves will speak, and someday, I tell you, you will write your thoughts on the surface of the sea.
A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.
I spent an hour looking at pots and carpets in the museums the other day, until the desire to describe them became like the desire for the lusts of the flesh.