"What happened with that series of pieces is that the color was essentially manufactured perceptually. In the first room, room five, the color tone...had the quality of lunar moonlight green. In all this pieces the walls were completely white. You never saw color in paint. Any color was always picked up by light coming in. That is where it began. It was reflected of the surfaces that were the outside space. So you never saw the raw material." ( The art of light+space /Jan Butterfield ISBN 1-55859-272-5 )

James Turrell writes:"My works don't illustrate scientific principle, but I want them to express a certain consciousness, a certain knowing. My spaces must be sensitive to events outside themselves. They must bring external events into themselves. I think of my works as being important in terms of what they have to do with us and our relationship to the universe, but not necessarily in scientific terms. I'm concerned with what my spaces direct their seeing to, and hence what they direct our seeing to. At the same time, I'm interested in the expression of time. Because, even though you may have expressions of our particular historical moment in, say, the art of Andy Warhol, there are also expressions that go through time, beyond time, and have a sense of themselves that transcends any specific period. That's the part of art I'm interested in. This said, however, I do want to be involved with the here and now. I want my art to function in contemporary terms..."

Adolf Krischanitz writes: "Light, as substance, is liberated in James Turrell's art, so that it no longer generates random illusionist images (whether photographs, film or video), but a pure picture of light. The limiting, dissolving and therefore material properties of light have an emancipating effect on it, so that light becomes constituent energy. The contrastive juxtaposition of the compact machinery(vessels) and the flowing material of light brings forth that bipolar tension which flashes up when we realize that the essence of art is a complex interaction between the machinery and its effect. Furthermore, the viewer himself is a living vessel and therefore space. He is not simply thrown back upon himself, but his sensory apparatus is both a reflexive end-user and an extension of the machine..."

See his famous Light Installation at Roden Crater Arizona USA.