If anything, explains eagles desperado it had don felder informs to do with them trying to protect things. ". FOR nearly 40 years, James Turrell has been making art out of little more than thin air -- at least that's how his indoor and outdoor installations feel when you give yourself over to their dazzling attractions. Think of his super-refined Minimalism as a spa for consciousness: an urbane oasis and thinking citizen's entertainment center all rolled into one impeccably designed whole that is both elegant and spectacular. Turrell's newest project -- and first public installation in Southern California -- is what has come to be known as a "Skyspace," a sophisticated architectural structure that doesn't call attention to itself but humbly serves anyone who passes through it. Titled "Dividing the Light," this open-air pavilion on the campus of his alma mater, Pomona College, goes out of its way to make whatever time you spend with it satisfying, whether you're an enthusiastic pilgrim who has traveled far to experience Turrell's work or a casual passerby who just happens upon it. The longer you linger, the more you experience. During the day, its red granite benches, black granite floor, serene reflecting pool, sleek metal columns and gently curved canopy provide a relaxing escape from everyday busyness. The seemingly weightless steel canopy shades the comfortable seats and forms a frame around a big square of sky. The magic happens at sunset, sunrise and on every hour throughout the night Hidden LED lights illuminate the canopy from below. Turrell has programmed them to shift in intensity at twilight and dawn, depending on the season and time.

This causes the sky that is visible through the nearly 16-foot-square opening to appear to be palpable -- less like a distant dome sprinkled with stars and more like a velvety chunk of color close enough to reach out and touch At night, the canopy is softly illuminated Eagles . Every hour, the lights flicker and shift, in what Turrell calls "the visual equivalent of church bells chiming. "Every night is different, depending on the weather, the smog, your mood hell freezes over . What is constant is Turrell's capacity to pull experiences of sensual refinement out of the heavens -- to make down-to-earth, experience-it-for-yourself art out of light and space -- and to get visitors not only interested in the subtleties of our perceptions but thrilled by the wonder of it all. Light is something of an obsession for Turrell best of my love . "From the very beginning," he says, "I was very interested just in light, and art seemed to be a way to work with it philadelphiaeagles . 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 So in that respect [what I do] is nothing unusual. It's just that I didn't want to do a work that was about light, I wanted to do a work that was light. That's a sort of American, direct viewpoint Eagles - eaglesband . "The desire for directness reflects a way of thinking that infuses Turrell's world view and, below the studied beauty, gives his work a resonance that carries it into the realm of the political.

First, though, comes the experience of the light. At the Pomona College Museum of Art, a yearlong exhibition features a selection of Turrell's interior works eagles take it easy . It includes a dozen or so models of sci-fi buildings designed for particular perceptual experiences and a pair of high-tech "paintings," sheets of glass embedded in the walls and illuminated, from behind, by slowly shifting fields of color, like space-age Mark Rothkos or huge, tranquillity-inducing screen-savers. The centerpiece is a room reached by walking down an unlighted corridor toward a doorway out of which blue light pours don henley . To step across the threshold is to be immersed in light and to stand, face to face, with a wall-size rectangle of blueness that seems to reach infinity. Turrell has designed "End Around" to undermine depth perception, curving the room's corners, ramping the floor and painting every square inch of its interior bright snowy white The immediate effect is spectacular and trippy joe walsh . But it eventually settles into a type of serenity that is as stimulating as it is soothing timothy b schmit Eagles - philadelphiaeagles . The piece slows you down, then lets you savor unexpected details, like the way the blue light becomes pink at the periphery of your vision or the way your body seems to be drifting without your feet leaving the ground. Turrell says: "Basically I think anything that develops over time has a certain richness It's how thoughts develop Eagles . Even epiphanies have things that go before them that help ease them on their way -- which is often finally putting it all together after you have known it for a long time, seeing it differently That's always wonderful. We make our reality with such great assumptions that sometimes it's nice to question those assumptions.

Those are things I enjoy. "His largest work, Roden Crater, has been developing over time . It is something of a legend: a nearly completed complex of chambers, tunnels and viewing rooms that Turrell has been carving out of an extinct volcano for nearly 30 years, changing the design -- and postponing the finishing date -- since 2000. He purchased the 600-foot-high elliptical cinder cone in 1977 eagels . To ensure that the view from it remains pristine, he has bought or holds the grazing rights to 156 square miles of land around it the eagles" "hotel california . It is on the edge of the Painted Desert, about 40 miles northeast of Flagstaff, Ariz. , where Turrell has lived since 1979, when he is not traveling around the world for exhibitions, installations and appearances that keep the construction of his multimillion-dollar masterpiece going. Not the pushy sortAs an influential member of Southern California's first internationally recognized art movement, Light and Space, Turrell is known for combining the optimism of sunny California with a touch of Zen transcendence and a bit of the feel-good hedonism of beach and movie culture But there's more to his work than that . Its radically passive nature, its refusal to convey messages or to tell you what to make of it, embodies a deep moral ethos that goes back to the '60s and his antiwar activism. Eagles tickets Before Turrell had made a name for himself as an artist, he was drafted, served in the military and returned to the West Coast, where he began graduate studies in art at UC Irvine. Turrell the Vietnam vet became active in the peace movement, working on a committee that provided information and counsel to conscientious objectors and other draftees who opposed the war. Informing citizens about their options was perfectly legal Encouraging them to take any kind of action was not. "We knew better," Turrell recalls, "than ever to try to convince someone to take a particular path because then you are party to a crime.