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She was absolutely revolutionary.
She moved art forward by about, I don't know, 500 years,
1,000 years, and no-one ever gave her the right credit for that.
A painter... Yes. ..first and foremost. And that's what I do.
What's most striking about her work is the extreme originality of it.
She was clearing the air, she was rinsing the eye.
The one thing people say, you can't look at it - it keeps moving
and jumping and it hurts your eyes. I'd hate to have it on my wall.
Well, that's not altogether relevant, is it?
Art has got other things to do besides being
comfortable to live with.
When I look at her work, I just sort of breathe it in, really.
I'm a big believer in art as experience,
so Bridget is one of the goddesses of this idea!
Please do not adjust your set.
It's difficult to name a living female artist who has had the impact
that Bridget has for such a prolonged period of time
and equally so consistently.
You can always stop.
Bridget Riley has spent 60 years pushing
the possibilities of painting.
Her dazzling experimental work invites us
to feel with our eyes and experience new ways of seeing.
Today, Riley is one of our greatest living artists and,
at the age of 90, shows no sign of stopping.
BBC cameras have been filming Bridget Riley over the past
few years, both at her studios in Cornwall and London, and for
the installation of her enormous mural in the National Gallery.
I met her at her studio in London for an extremely rare interview,
where I found out how Bridget Riley became Bridget Riley.
Many think of her as a poster girl for the swinging '60s,
others hail her as a titan of abstract art,
but Bridget herself tells a very different story.
I want to talk about your own early memories in Cornwall.
What do you remember about that? Um...
We had evacuated ourselves - my mother,
my sister and I and my father's sister.
He had gone to the war and was reported missing.
We lost him for many, many years. Mm-hm.
My mother had spent many holidays
and lived also in Cornwall as a child.
We had a very small cottage - four rooms.
I didn't go to school, not for...not for quite a long time,
which was very, very heavenly!
There was nowhere particularly to go or any reason to go there,
but it was beautiful. Mm-hm. We were not far from the coast.
We were there nearly five years, so there was, in fact,
nothing to do but look and enjoy and appreciate
and move around and walk in this extraordinarily beautiful landscape.
In 2017, Riley took BBC cameras back to Cornwall to retrace
the steps of her youth along the wild coastline.
Over there, that double gabled house with the white side
to it, is the old fish sellers, which my grandfather
bought in the 19th century and made into a family home.
Visits here, when I was young, during the war,
were very precious expeditions because you had to walk -
there was no petrol, no cars, no transport -
so one walked, which was the best way to see the landscape anyhow.
Did your mother and your aunt, who I knew had gone to Goldsmiths,
did they actually direct you, "this could be good for art"?
Or was it simply... No, no, no.
..look at this flower, look at that cloud? No. We'd go out for a walk.
It was something to do, and that's what we did.
But do you think it was then that you made
the foundations of an artistic personality?
Do you think that's where it came from? Yes, I do.
There are so many interlocking shapes and rhythms that,
while not exactly consciously thinking about,
do rise to the surface when you're drawing.
You see the patterns that, when the wave breaks, come right up?
Ha!
And curves round.
SHE LAUGHS
But all those overlapping, curving shapes of the tide, as it
comes up and turns round and goes back - just endlessly fascinating.
And it will never be the same again.
Every single unique, every single way,
every single breaking of the sea on the rocks has never happened
again exactly like that and has never happened before.
Riley nurtured her interest in art at Cheltenham Ladies' College
and by spending hours in the National Gallery in London.
She was classically trained at Goldsmiths and then at
the Royal College of Art, where her classmates included
Peter Blake, Frank Auerbach and John Bratby.
When I was a student at the Royal College of Art,
and there was all the alumni's work on the wall, so I had to sit and
invigilate next to Bridget Riley's work,
and so I was just constantly staring at her work,
and her student work was a portrait of a woman done in a very
sort of Cezanney type style, really, and no-one would ever, ever,
ever possibly believe that it was Bridget Riley's,
but it was painted very well. She could paint.
She could have painted however she wanted -
she chose to paint the way that she does.
She moved her mind from being like an average student who could
paint well into a phenomenal artist that did something really
ground-breaking and seminal.
Well, this one was what I...
..the ones I did at Goldsmiths.
This is a girl sitting on the white pillow.
That was at the Royal College, and I can boast that they're very,
very different but there's something about that one I prefer.
Riley left art college in 1955, highly skilled
but unsure of her style or subject.
She spent some time teaching, working in a shop,
nursing her father and suffering ill health herself.
She also worked as an illustrator at an advertising agency.
But it was in the work of French post-impressionist painter
Georges Seurat that she discovered a pursuit that would become her
lifelong passion - rethinking the very nature of perception itself.
She talked to the BBC about him in 1979.
I think one of the things that's most appealing about him
was that he wanted the new,
he wanted tremendously to be a modern artist in his, um...to, er...
And science was actually the new excitement of the time,
and he wanted to embrace this, to weld it into art,
to draw on it through, you know, resources. What I love...
You said about Seurat... Mm.
..that you learned method from him, but not his method.
You learned method from him. Yes.
And what is that method, then,
of building up your colour, of tonality?
The induction of colour, that is
that colour can induce something it's not, on both levels -
in actuality, as a pigment,
and in the proximity and its interaction with what's next to it.
Or when it's in a big field.
So it's an immense, essentially unstable but,
because of that, hugely exciting field to work with.
Riley explored Seurat's technique by faithfully copying
one of his paintings.
One of the things that I found
when I copied it was that he must have worked over the entire surface.
For instance, with the blues, I think
he must have worked over all the blue tendencies,
and then with the pinks and with the greens and with the yellows.
This black has orange, red...
..blue, green, altogether
blending into a vibrant black, not a dead black, but a vibrant black.
Not a dead black, but a vibrant black.
Riley pursued Seurat's pointillist style,
most notably in her 1960 work Pink Landscape,
but she explained in 2019
how disappointed she was with the results.
Although it was competent and the best I could do...
..I did feel that it did not convey
what I had experienced
when I was looking at the valley
over in Siena
under the sizzling heat.
And what I had not got
was the sensation...
..And so I'd missed it.
I'd missed the most important thing.
The sensation of the heat,
the shimmer, the dazzle,
the glitter of light.
And I wondered really what I had been doing.
I'd been going up a wrong path.
However, this failure was a key turning point in Riley's career,
finally giving her the sense of direction
she'd been craving since art college.
When I started then to work from the pictorial elements themselves
to find out what they could do
when they were no longer serving a purpose,
but just for themselves,
which was experimental.
I began a long process of finding out,
and with the finding out,
I would find a sensation
which I recognised, something I'd experienced before in nature.
And it was not just Riley and her art
that were hurtling in a different direction.
As the '60s dawned, cultural and social barriers
were being dismantled by a post-war generation hungry for change.
Do you think art has helped you understand the world,
that shaped your understanding of the world?
Yes, I do, actually.
I think that artists have...
Painters have borne witness...
It's one of the tasks, so to speak.
..to changing circumstances
and events, to horrors
as well as to wonders.
And so they held a mirror up...
..to human nature
and reported, you know...
..faithfully.
I grew up in the 1950s,
which in provincial England
was really a visual blackout.
I mean, there was absolutely nothing to look at.
British art was very stagnant, really.
It was a stagnant pond.
Bridget had a wonderful phrase for it.
"Infectious apathy and vicious insularity,"
and the minute I read that phrase,
I recognised, "That is the world I grew up in,"
certainly so far as the arts were concerned.
I knew we were living in the 20th century,
but there was no visual evidence of that
so far as the art world was concerned.
So Bridget's first task - that of her whole generation
but, in a sense, she spearheaded it -
was to blow up,
to dynamite,
this very...
This world of preconceptions, of received views, of tired eyes.
The epicentre of the burgeoning contemporary art scene
was the Whitechapel Gallery in London,
where director Bryan Robertson broadened the horizons
of British artists like Bridget Riley.
It was the Whitechapel,
which showed those, among marvellous American painters,
the abstract expressionist Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock.
They all had solo shows at the Whitechapel
and what Bryan did...
First of all, he chose and curated those shows.
Bridget Riley herself said, "He gave us confidence,"
which was very necessary in those days.
He gave them the sense that they could operate on the same scale
and that they didn't have to...
They didn't have to take a backseat.
That they, too, could do things as powerful, as intense,
as original, as expressive
of how it felt to be alive at that time.
And this was a completely new concept in British art,
and we lived just up the road from Bridget.
When she'd finished a painting,
we, my husband and I, were very often the...
She would ring us up just to come and see, you know,
a painter in his studio or her studio,
when a thing is actually finished does like an outside eye on it.
So we had that pleasure and privilege
of sitting and looking at many of those blacks and whites
as soon as they were finished.
It was an extraordinary experience.
Inspired by the abstract expressionists
and Italian futurists,
Riley exploded onto the art scene
at the age of 30 with dazzling black and white paintings
that were like nothing that had ever been seen before.
It's interesting to think about whether it was shocking or not
because, in a sense, it was,
but it was accessible.
I remember Kiss.
That, I first saw in the gallery.
It's a painting of 1961
from Bridget's first show when she really hit her stride.
It just amazed me.
I'd never seen anything like it.
I suddenly realised that, to represent the 20th century,
you couldn't go on using worn-out 19th century conventions.
My paintings are not concerned with the romantic legacy of expression,
nor with fantasies, concepts or symbols.
I draw from nature.
I work with nature.
Although in completely new terms.
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 colour and form
as ultimate identities,
freeing them from all descriptive or functional roles.
You talked about a shift in your work from perceptual orientation
to one of sensation, but you have a sensation
in front of your paintings that doesn't always, for me anyway,
constitute abstract because you have a huge emotional engagement
with your paintings.
So do you think "abstract" is the right word for you,
as an artist?
You're ALWAYS called an abstract artist.
I... No, I don't know...
I don't know that it is.
I don't... I don't...
I think it's the one we use at the moment, and so I go along with it.
But if somebody said I was an abstract artist,
I would say, "That isn't a possibility."
Perhaps I explore and I try to understand,
and try to find out what I can look at, what can be seen.
Movement in squares was one small change
slowly, slowly building on,
building on, building on, building on
until it accelerated into a rapid movement in the square.
It shuttled almost to extinction
and then it would have closed the painting.
There wouldn't have been anything there.
I could do nothing but come back.
I didn't have to go the whole way back,
but some of the way back and...
..the next painting, which was Black To White Discs,
I wanted to slow the whole thing down.
And I realised if you made it larger,
it would slow it down even more.
So, in this way, involuntarily,
almost, I began to...
..discover that I was actually working with my own sight...
Mm-hm. ..your sight, the viewer's sight...
..and this gave us a..
That was the basis of communication.
In making work that is about what it feels like to look at something,
Riley's paintings are truly interactive.
Each one completed by the viewer's own perception.
You finish a painting and send it out into the world.
To me, it's like pushing a boat out into the sea.
It's on its own from now,
a thing in the world,
present.
It must do the best it can
by itself,
which is to offer an experience,
offer a possibility.
It is funny because you do feel
like you've entered a different space.
It's kind of weird. It is odd.
It's like a different room.
It's a sort of weird, sci-fi room...
..with maths in it.
The first thing that hits you
is just how you respond to it viscerally.
Because I try... I suppose I try and judge everything by,
"Does it bypass my brain and hit me there?"
And if it does, then I'm interested, you know.
It's about allowing us to see differently
and to understand differently.
And if we can do that,
then you can accept all the differences around you.
Rhythm and repetition are at the root of movement.
They create a situation within which
the most simple, basic forms
start to become visually active.
By massing them and repeating them,
they become more fully present.
Repetition acts as a sort of amplifier for visual events,
which scene singly would hardly be visible.
But to make these basic forms release
the full visual energy within them,
they have to breathe, as it were, to open and close...
..or to tighten up and then relax.
A rhythm that's alive has to do with changing pace
and feeling how the visual speed can expand and contract.
Sometimes go slower
and sometimes go faster.
The whole thing must live.
It's not obvious what the subject is at all.
It's way more sensory, I suppose.
I we sometimes it makes you feel uneasy, to be honest.
And sometimes, it's a crass thing to say,
but it makes your eyes go funny.
It's not mischief.
I don't want to say, "I'm just being mischievous."
It's a field of exploration.
But it also creates movement in the paintings...
Of course it does because... ..and excitement.
Yes, it does because this is an event happening,
something is happening.
Painting is like music, and it's easier if you think of it
in those terms.
Exactly as with music, you can describe it in terms of metaphors,
you can say what it makes you feel like,
but the actual feeling is what's happening.
And I think music is a much easier way of thinking about one's response
to Bridget's paintings than...
..art criticism, shall we say?
Look at the titles of her early paintings -
Tremor, Shift, Hesitate, Fall, Deny, Blaze.
You know, they themselves,
I know they're only titles, but they give you some sense
of what's going on in the pictures.
It's brilliant that she titles them because a lot of artists
that make really hardcore, minimal work,
it's always untitled with the title in brackets or untitled
with a number, untitled B49 or something,
and it's great that she titles the work
because you then definitely are given a clue that
there is an emotional impact in them.
Riley's bold new style coincided with the op art craze
of the early 1960s.
Mind-bending art use patterns to create optical illusions
and was lapped up by an audience hungry for psychedelic experiences.
The "op art" label follows Riley around to this day,
but she has always identified with a much older artistic tradition.
The one period that people talk about you having
ambivalence towards is the whole op art time,
that you were associated with op art.
Was it really almost against your will,
or was it just a timing issue?
It was more a timing issue.
I think, actually, how we see and perception
was obviously a major plank
in the development of impressionism and post impressionism,
and the whole modern art movement.
So actually, op art is...was a blip,
so to speak on the side.
I mean, I think Cezanne said, "We need a new optics."
When he found that, what he actually experienced...
..didn't measure up to the organisation of pictorial space.
It was a blockbuster exhibition of op art
at the Museum of Modern Art in New York
that sealed Riley's reputation as a major international artist.
However, she found the fame that followed uncomfortable
as her art flowed from galleries onto high streets,
defining the look of an entire era.
Bridget has often expressed to me her unhappiness
about what happened with the commercialisation of her work,
which was done without her permission
when she, you know, she arrived in New York
and saw dresses in Bloomingdales
which had her...
Basically with patterns coming from her paintings,
understandably very distressing.
How do you feel when you walk down the street and you see...? Um...
A bit sick.
When your art was displayed alongside '60s fashion and so forth,
you didn't see that as being
something that you particularly enjoyed.
I didn't have much of a chance
to say anything about my work.
Right.
And I think, in fact, it was a failure to understand.
A failure to understand your artistic endeavour
versus somebody's...
..op art mini skirt.
It was a very serious exhibition.
I think the museum lost control of it.
People were very excited about it
because they did sense,
quite rightly, that there was a big field here, a huge opportunity...
..for really, a new look at things
and it just it just felt, it was too much.
That idea of an exhibition being that popular,
of contemporary art, that may have been the first one
where there was that kind of big popular response
and so nobody was really prepared for it.
There's a sort of pressure which artists haven't had to put up with.
I mean, you know, there is a philosophy since the 19th century
of failure which protects an artist.
There's a moral equation between failure and value...
..and we've got geared to this.
Well, now we've got this problem of success
and there's no actual philosophy do to cope.
We've got to evolve one.
And I think this is going to be one of the problems.
In your long career,
artistic dilemmas, you've only done,
3D once.
Tell me about that.
Well, that came about
when the National Gallery bought
a big water lily painting.
It was a big painting and you are enveloped in it visually,
and I thought I would make a big painting,
which enveloped you physically.
That was a great mistake.
That was too literal, absolutely too literal,
so I went back to flat painting
and engaging you on painting's proper condition,
which is flat and open.
But if you hadn't done that,
you wouldn't have known that that's where you wanted to be
and so is there ever such a thing as a mistake or is it just...?
Oh, no, you're quite right.
In a way there's not.
And as Matisse said, "Don't get rid of your mistakes."
Meaning, you know, that they are the things
that will help you to get to move
and to think, and to understand...
..a little bit more about what you're doing.
Riley introduced pure colour
to her paintings in 1967.
When you moved from black and white,
that was momentous for you.
Well, I was heading towards it,
but it had been a slow and gradual approach
through tone
and through drawing and life drawing before that.
Of course,
colour as light and colour as paint behave in quite different ways.
It was artists like Monet and Seurat
who taught us to make paint behave as light does
by dividing up the colour on the canvas
so that it works optically,
only mixing in the actual process of seeing it.
Seeing it is when the painting starts to live,
that is when it begins.
Everything else is like setting the stage
before the curtain goes up on the drama itself.
I really like her use of colour,
and the fact that it's not narrative,
or is not for me.
It looks deceptively simple, you know, her sort of work
where you go, "It's just a lot of stripes," and it's not.
Or think it's been printed or something, you know,
and when you take a closer look, it's, you know, done by hand.
And so there's a lot of love and care gone into something
that ostensibly has no story
and is not a person,
it's not a sort of classical Greek tale or something.
Colours are absolutely interdependent.
What is literally on the canvas is not all you can see.
It's only the springboard which makes you see more.
I was at Bridget's studio once looking at a stripe painting,
and I noticed, incredibly, that each stripe seemed to have
this very narrow black edge to it...
..and I thought, "God, that must be impossible to paint."
And I asked her about it and she said,
"No, actually, that's just in your mind.
"This is something Leonardo discovered,
"that when you put two colours together
"that have a certain relationship on the colour spectrum,
"your mind fills in...
"..a dark line."
Riley chose no smaller stage on which to debut her move to colour
than the 1968 Venice Biennale,
when she was selected to represent Great Britain
alongside sculptor Phillip King.
The gamble paid off,
and she became the first British contemporary painter
and the first woman to be awarded the international prize
for painting at the Biennale.
I think it must have come as a great surprise to a lot of people
that this young British woman artist
who is making this work
that some people maybe associated with op art,
which had been popularised in a way
that sometimes makes art people nervous
that their little sanctuary is...
..getting taken over by the barbarians.
So it must have been something that,
like Bridget's paintings, unsettled a few people.
On the other hand, if you really were serious
about painting in 1968...
..I can't really think of any other artist
who was more deserving of winning a prize like that than Bridget.
In the same year as Riley's triumph at the Venice Biennale,
she and fellow artist Peter Sedgley created the Space.
It was 1968, the Year of Revolution,
and Riley had a radical idea
inspired by the artist studios she'd seen in New York.
Space would take over empty warehouses
to create a utopian community of artists with more space to work.
When I came to Britain, I realised
that many, many artists work basically at home.
They had maybe the basement of the house
or the main room of the house was like...
They were... The studios were in domesticated spaces
because there weren't, at that time,
obvious other spaces to use as studios.
I was in the first Space studio, which was at St Katharine's Docks.
I remember it as bitterly cold in the winter.
Freezing, howling wind.
It's interesting looking back
because this was not something that was self-serving.
It wasn't serving her.
She was already successful enough
and had, you know, had enough money
to be able to have proper studio space.
It was really providing space for people like myself
who, you know, if you couldn't rent very modest spaces,
you didn't have one.
And so it served a fantastic function
and, particularly during the late '60s
and then through the '70s and '80s,
these were particularly important.
The scheme still goes on.
Space Studios has over 600 artists...
..having studios that they may be share in London
through disused buildings.
Those steps need governmental support
and also private enterprise to take a hand.
You see, it's a marvellous studio.
Bigger space made for bigger paintings and, during the '70s,
Riley's work became more expansive and increasingly curvy.
Her reputation grew, too,
and, in 1971, she had her first retrospective exhibited
in Germany, Italy and then London.
Bridget had her first show at the Hayward 50 years ago,
1971,
and apparently the first guy waiting to buy a ticket was Francis Bacon.
You know you think, "OK, who are the great British tradition
"of painting that Bridget Riley might fit in?"
Probably the last person you think of is Francis Bacon.
But Bacon apparently said to Bridget that...
..he had always thought the only way
you could really unsettle and disturb a viewer
was by distorting and deforming the human body and face.
That he'd learned from Bridget's paintings
that actually there was a completely different way to do it
where you didn't even depict the human form.
You just made paintings that could destabilise people's perceptions.
A far cry from the Cornish coast and the work of Seurat,
the ancient art of Egypt and its fixed palette of just five colours
triggered another turning point in Riley's career
during a visit there in 1979.
However, she was initially wary
of putting her experience into her work.
I did hesitate
because I felt that perhaps this was stealing.
It belonged to them.
I shouldn't touch it.
Then I thought of Picasso,
and I thought he would have thought
this was ridiculous inhibition on my part
and so I should respond.
So, I put away all...
..the postcards, photographs,
everything that I had brought back
and from...
..remembered sensations,
I put together my version of the Egyptian palette.
What I did discover after Egypt
was not only the colours, but the way that the Egyptians
organised their flat surfaces
in what you might call a processional manner,
that is to say their majestic figures walked across the areas.
And in a sense, I had the same feeling
that these colours proceed with a certain measure of pace.
After a while, I felt I had exhausted the possibilities
of what I could do within the stripe format
and that I was very, very constricted
in a kind of prison. I had to break out of it.
I wanted to be able to move the eye
in a wider variety of ways
around the canvas.
In Gentle Edge,
I crossed some of the bands with a narrow diagonal hatching.
This began to break down the structure.
Working with her Egyptian palette,
Riley supersized her work yet further,
creating enormous murals for hospitals in Liverpool and London
between 1983 and 2014.
I'd visited my mother so many times in hospital in Cornwall,
so I certainly wanted...
..to contribute something to the hospital,
but I didn't know how.
I knew it should be colour,
I knew it should evoke life outside the hospital.
The most important thing.
And that to some extent meant skies, seas, fields,
nature as we most generally understand it.
But how to articulate that was very, very puzzling.
It's funny that hospital paintings of Bridget's have tended to be these
really long horizontal lines,
which do suggest a kind of continuity...
..which, maybe if you're in a hospital,
is a nice thing to think about.
In the early '80s,
Riley found her style at odds with the aesthetic excesses
of the new decade
as the focus in art shifted to neo expressionist works
by the likes of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Julian Schnabel.
There's a great variety for Bridget Riley.
There's the huge exhibition at the Hayward,
but you also have much smaller exhibitions
where, for example, in Ayrshire, in Ayr.
That must have been the beginning of the '80s.
People were not liking my work very much.
They weren't... It was doldrums
and that does... Must happen and does happen
in a painter's life, you know?
And so I was very glad of the chance to go somewhere else,
and I went up there and...
..gave a talk.
There were 15 people in the audience,
but they asked me such good questions.
We had a ball.
We had a great, great time.
I thought we wouldn't find this gallery,
but they said, "Oh, yes, you will, we'll signpost it."
And so they got the AA to put up signs
saying "Bridget Riley Exhibition."
Riley stuck to her guns
and continued to experiment with shapes and colours.
She experienced a renaissance in the 1990s
and, in 2017, created her largest work to date
at a contemporary art museum in Texas -
revisiting the Egyptian palette she'd used
in the Royal Liverpool University Hospital over 30 years earlier.
The best piece of work of hers I ever saw
was that the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Donald Judd's foundation,
and it's, like, this amazing...
This is out in the desert.
And there's just like this sort of kind of ex army base
and, on the walls, there's just a stripe
that goes... These stripes that just go all the way around.
And so you see the stripes
and then you see the windows with the desert in the background.
It is phenomenal, it's fantastic, and it makes you understand
about Bridget Riley's big ideas.
She wasn't painting a picture.
She's not painting an area.
She's painting a whole idea.
Just before the mural was unveiled in Texas,
Riley gave BBC cameras access to her London studio
to discuss her process in making a work more than 120 metres long.
I often make notes...
..to just helped me think something through
and here I've got one before the
black bumper bar is put in,
in which I've taken...
..one square of blue out of here
and put it into two... Another square of yellow down there.
I don't know what it looked like,
but it was a thought.
It's an architecture of art.
You know, this is not just painting in the studio
solely from one subject,
but it's an immersion in something completely different,
and it's, you know, it gets to the core of what Bridget does so well.
She's looking at form, she's looking at intellectual approaches to art,
she's immersing herself in writing about abstract painting
and literature, and poetry.
I mean, it's a complete myriad of different things.
In recent years, Riley has returned to the sort of black and white work
she was making in the '60s,
once again drawing on nature for inspiration.
The curves and movement of this row of Tamarisk trees,
which the wind seems to pick up a series of waves,
almost, as a dancing freeze.
The wind is such a big force down here, does draw sometimes
with the landscape,
just draws patterns of indescribable beauty.
When there's a little breeze that will come,
especially if the long grasses pick up on, you know,
a rhythm that repeats across as the breeze goes.
I thought that you might like to see this
because, yesterday, when we were by the sea
and walking along the Tamarisk lane,
there was a kind of cross movement of light and shade,
and light and shade, which certainly did not in any way
consciously inspire this painting
but as part of the many sensations
of walking and passing by things,
there is a movement in it,
quite elusive, of gathering dark...
..and giving way to light lighter passages.
Nature is the origin and feeds what I make,
but it's not direct
and so one does not lead straight to the other.
If I know what I'm going to get...
..I lose interest.
I need just a little small connecting point
from the present known that I have in the studio...
..to an unknown that lies just beyond
what I have already seen.
This experience of say of looking at a painting
and seeing one type of order...
..and then suddenly seeing that order switch
and you see another arrangement
within these shapes and forms on a canvas,
then it switches again.
That's something anyone who's ever looked at a body of moving water
in the sunlight understands,
this constant making of
patterns that then fall apart and reform again.
We all share these kinds of experiences in our memory,
and I think sometimes some of the things that Bridget makes,
the experiences she creates,
the sensations that her paintings
allow us to access
can recall some of those moments.
How important to you...
..is it that many people experience your work?
You know, if it's in public spaces
and I wonder what you feel like when you go through a public space
where you've made a beautiful piece of work and it's appreciated.
Do you get a sense of pride every time you see it?
Well, yes. I have had a great treat
in that I was invited to do something
for the Annenberg Court,
the Getty Entrance to the National Gallery
AND I must admit, I have longed to do something about it
for years and years and years.
You didn't say, "Can I have that wall over there?
"Can I have that wall over there?" No, no, no.
The gallery has such a lot to offer.
If people could only find a way of,
in a way, daring to come and have a look at it.
And your work is what welcomes them in.
It's very unusual, at the National Gallery,
that we ask an artist to produce something
that is essentially permanent.
There are one or two precedents, but it's fairly rare.
Riley's enormous mural, entitled Messengers,
was installed in 2019
when she revealed how its title was inspired by the clouds
in a painting by John Constable.
It was a wonderful moment.
It's such a fantastic painting.
You can see the light falling from the clear blue sky above
on these upper parts of all these clouds,
and you can see the darker ones underneath,
these little detached things of messengers.
This is a messenger, I think, going across there.
What it does in the whole painting is it creates,
helps to create, a huge feeling of space.
And that's where the title came from?
Suddenly, it was a sort of eureka moment
where Messengers kind of emerged?
Yes, it was simply wonderful.
I particularly like it when it's very bright and you're seeing it
from sort of further back, and it's really glowing.
And I think when it's like that,
you get that sense of these discs floating on this white background
and you also get these after images.
So the whole of Messengers is sort of moving in front of your eyes.
It's almost like it's dancing.
You need to devote a little bit of time to it.
It's very enjoyable.
I think it's very uplifting.
In the same year as Messengers was unveiled,
the Hayward Gallery in London hosted another
major Riley retrospective, almost 50 years since her first one there.
We live in the era of the drive-by gallery visit
where people just kind of cruise by and look at this thing here
and look at that thing there.
And one of the wonderful things about Bridget Riley's show
is that the audiences are actually looking
really carefully at everything they see...
..partly because their experience of looking
is changing as they're looking.
Her works really seem to change the space you're looking at.
They seem to come off the wall
and enter the space you're in,
and you can't really get that from looking at an image on a phone
or a computer, or in a book even.
Riley's interest in creating a fresh way of seeing
roots her very modern work in an artistic tradition
stretching back centuries.
Bridget is arguably one of the artists most steeped in the history
of art, and I think that's the most interesting thing about her lineage
is that she's taken all of this work,
she's really studied it and looked at it critically, analytically,
artistically, but put it into her own language.
My work has certainly drawn
on the work of painters in the past.
I've enjoyed enormously...
..exhibitions at the National Gallery.
I've travelled to see paintings in other countries,
and I would say the past painting
has given me a lot of friends.
Some of the figures, say, that are Bridget's kind of Hall of Fame
in terms of artists who, like her, were really interested in
research and analysis, and the colour, and colour relationships.
And there are some great 19th century French artists,
including Cezanne and Seurat, and Monet.
And then in the 20th century,
I think Mondrian, who was then taking more of a
stripped-down geometric idea of colour relationships.
When I look at Bridget's work,
I see her connectedness with the great art of the past
has been, in its radicality, in its uniqueness,
I don't see it as with some artists as a clear derivation
of something, in the spirit
of what happened is like what
Picasso did, or what Cezanne did.
What Seurat did.
It's not in the appearance of the work at all.
It's in that spirit of invention and innovation.
Another radical who inspired Riley
was Masaccio, the most revolutionary painter of the Renaissance.
Masaccio laid a foundation stone of Western painting...
..and as I'm a western painter, we're at each end of the tradition.
He's interested in light very differently, of course, from me
but we do both have an interest
in light, in surface,
in different notions of depth.
Although superficially, it might look as though we're very different,
we share many painterly interests.
Something else the renaissance inspired in Riley
is the use of a studio of assistants,
something that was unheard of for a painter in the 1960s.
What Bridget was doing was something much closer to what say
a sculptor does when commissioning a large work.
When Henry Moore was working, he didn't make the bronze sculptures
that we know him for.
He made maquettes, he made...
He made models from which other people executed
the work that we say is his, that is his,
and in a sense, that's similar to what Bridget was doing.
Today, many, many artists use other people to make works,
and we take that for granted,
but when Bridget first started doing that,
that was a very, very radical thing.
In a sense, I get drawn too much
into the actual execution
and I have to be detached.
I have seen how the thing
can take shape in study form
and in cartoon form and in decision-making.
I think, for Bridget, who is a really, really serious,
serious, serious, serious artist
and I think if we knew the background behind every painting,
behind every colour wave, behind every mood and every emotion,
we wouldn't be able to feel it ourselves.
We would be pressurised by her emotions.
And it's better that we look at it and we feel the vibrations,
we feel the emotion through the colour,
we understand it for how we feel, not how she felt.
At the start of a painting,
I don't know the end of it.
And as long as I know the point of origin,
the initial problem, which is an intellectual one...
Are you confident that the way you are working in at the moment
is going to provide you with that?
Well, if it doesn't, it's a lack of my insight.
It's a failure on my part.
The vein itself is rich enough...
..for me and for, I think, several lifetimes of work.
Oh, heavens, yes.
But whether I continue to...
..have the clarity and the lucidity to perceive what I'm doing
is another matter.
Do you see things that you didn't see before, when you look back
at your paintings, maybe from 40 or 50 years?
Do you look at them differently?
Not always.
Sometimes they're entirely old friends.
Other times, I see things in them
which I didn't intend,
didn't see, didn't hope for,
didn't... Weren't, apparently.
And that, you know, is very tempting.
And so especially when I think that,
you know, with the time that I have still,
I want to make the most use of it
and actually explore further
some of the possibilities I see.
Almost 60 years after her first solo show,
Bridget Riley is still innovating, painting, publishing and exhibiting.
She has won numerous prestigious awards
and was made a companion of honour in 1998.
I think she's a phenomenal woman,
phenomenal artist,
and the fact that she keeps going and keeps going is fantastic.
She was ground-breaking and she did something seminal within art,
so people only look at that
and think of that, and they think that it's, like,
one idea, like something you know that anyone could do.
"Do some stripes." Let them try and do, let them try and invent it.
Let them try and believe in it.
Let them pursue it for the rest of their life and see how far they get.
You know, Bridget Riley's dedication and focus is pretty phenomenal.
What she has avoided is the pitfall
of trying to be commercially highly successful
at the expense of her longevity.
There it is, the Bridget Riley,
and I'm going to start with some interest here.
There is a considerable growth in the value of her pictures.
Currently, the record price at auction is over £4 million.
At £1,250,000.
Please, thank you. It's ironic in a way that Bridget,
now at the age that she is,
should be, you know, almost one of the newer hot artists.
And she's firmly in this kind of grouping
of great 20th century kind of British female artists now
and enjoying great success alongside younger artists
like Cecily Brown or Tracey Emin, for example.
More than anything, she didn't want to be thought of as a woman artist.
She did not want to be singled out because of her sex.
She'd completely understand her wish for that at the time.
But from the first day I was in art school,
through all of my years of teaching,
a minimum of 50% of the students were women.
But the number who actually succeeded to build careers
was tiny in comparison,
certainly not so much.
Today, we see a giant change, over the last 20 years.
But for many, many years,
that was not the case.
I think Bridget's achievement as a woman artist in Britain
is absolutely phenomenal.
You said, in 2009, for the last 50 years, it has been my belief
that, as a modern artist, you should make a contribution
to the art of your time,
even if it's only a small one.
So what do you think your contribution has been?
I couldn't be... I couldn't say.
That's for other people to.
Very modest.
No, it's just as I wouldn't know.
She's shown that the tradition of art isn't static.
It isn't dead.
There aren't people, for the most part,
who are trying to paint like Bridget.
It's not a question of a school of Riley kind of thing.
She's created this incredible example
of what can be done with the most minimal means
and yet sometimes this incredibly playful,
but also explosive, effect.
I suppose I hope that, when you ask me if I could make a contribution,
that I'm hoping that I can,
in some way, to order, stability,
even to pleasure,
to have joy of living.
The great privilege we have in being alive.