Bridget Louise Riley CH CBE (born 24 April 1931) is 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.
Painting is a science pursued as an enquiry into the laws of nature. . . Observation is considered the key to natural science.
As a painter today you have to work without that essential platform. But if one does not deceive oneself and accepts this lack of certainty, other things may come into play.
It is important that the painting can be inhabited, so that the mind's eye, or the eye's mind, can move about it credibly.
Painting is, I think, inevitably an archaic activity and one that depends on spiritual values.
For me nature is not landscape, but the dynamism of visual forces, an event rather than an appearance. These forces can only be tackled by treating color and form as ultimate identities, freeing them from all descriptive or functional roles.
I used to build up to sensation, accumulating tension until it released a perceptual experience
If you can allow colour to breathe, to occupy its own space, to play its own game in its unstable way, it's wanton behaviour, so to speak. It is promiscuous like nothing.
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.
I never make studies from nature. They would get in the way. I make use of my mind.
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.
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
In my earlier paintings, I wanted the space between the picture plane and the spectator to be active. It was in that space, paradoxically, the painting 'took place. ' Then, little by little, and to some extent deliberately, I made it go the other way, opening up an interior space. . . so that there was a layered, shallow depth.
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.
I work with nature, although in completely new terms.
Focusing isn't just an optical activity; it is also a mental one.
As the artist picks his way along, rejecting and accepting as he goes, certain patterns of enquiry emerge.
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.
I think this lack of a center has something to do with the loss of certainties that Christianity had to offer
For me nature is not landscape, but the dynamism of visual forces.
Painters have always needed a sort of veil upon which they can focus their attention. It's as though the more fully the consciousness is absorbed, the greater the freedom of the spirit behind