Bridget Riley
Bridget Riley
Bridget Louise Riley CH CBEis an English painter who is one of the foremost exponents of Op art. She currently lives and works in London, Cornwall and the Vaucluse in France...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionPainter
Date of Birth24 April 1931
squares giving essentials
I couldn’t get near what I wanted through seeing, recognizing and recreating, so I stood the problem on its head. I started studying squares, rectangles, triangles and the sensations they give rise to It is untrue that my work depends on any literary impulse or has any illustrative intention. The marks on the canvas are sole and essential agents in a series of relationships which form the structure of the painting.
term
I work with nature, although in completely new terms.
loss thinking christianity
I think this lack of a center has something to do with the loss of certainties that Christianity had to offer
artist mixtures conflict
An artist's early work is inevitably made up of a mixture of tendencies and interests, some of which are compatible and some of which are in conflict
moving eye looks
The eye can travel over the surface in a way parallel to the way it moves over nature. It should feel caressed and soothed, experience frictions and ruptures, glide and drift. One moment, there will be nothing to look at and the next second the canvas seems to refill, to be crowded with visual events.
spiritual thinking painting
Painting is, I think, inevitably an archaic activity and one that depends on spiritual values.
space focus painting
In general, my paintings are multifocal. You can't call it unfocused space, but not being fixed to a single focus is very much of our time.
reality belief interpretation
There was a time when meanings were focused and reality could be fixed; when that sort of belief disappeared, things became uncertain and open to interpretation.
character way accepting
The actual basis of colour is instability. Once you accept that in lieu of something which is stable, which is form, you are dealing with something which is unstable in its basic character, you begin to get a way of dealing with it.
art school thinking
It was only after I had been out of the art school that I actually copied a small Seurat, and I copied it in order to follow his thought, because if you do copy an artist, and you have a close feeling for him, in fact that you need to know more about his work, there is no better way than actually to copy, because you get very close indeed to how somebody thinks.
activity
Focusing isn't just an optical activity; it is also a mental one.
law keys enquiry
Painting is a science pursued as an enquiry into the laws of nature...Observation is considered the key to natural science.
failure artist doe
An artist's failures are as valuable as his successes: by misjudging one thing he conforms something else, even if at the time he does not know what that something else is.
thinking order magic
The word 'paradox' has always had a kind of magic for me, and I think my pictures have a paradoxical quality, a paradox of chaos and order in one.