A message in paint

In the studio of Bridget Riley

Article

No. 2 • March 2016

For more than sixty years, British artist Bridget Riley has worked determinedly on her paintings in exciting colours and swirling black and white. An extraordinary photo essay in her London studio.

text: Michael Bracewell

In the colourful paintings made by British artist Bridget Riley over the past 65 years, she has been endlessly exploring the relationship between colour, form, composition and visual perception. There is something timeless about her work, as we can see in the rippling, smoky undulations in violet, pink and tangerine of Song of Orpheus 3 (1978), in the coloured checks interspersed with blocks in black and white of New Day (1988), and in her series of black circles on a white ground, a huge painting titled Composition with Circles 6 (2008). Work of breathtaking beauty, in which the visually unexpected is captured in an ecstatic process of determination.

Fig 1. Bridget Riley in her studio in Holland Park London | Photo: Eamonn McCabe

Fig 2. Standing Up, Turning Round, Lying Down, 2015

When her first major retrospective, Bridget Riley: Paintings and Drawings 1951-1971, it not only surpassed all previous visitor numbers, but also confirmed the iconic power of Riley’s distinctive style. I visited that exhibition as a teenager, and although I was unaware of the historical development in Riley’s work at the time, the paintings and drawings had an enormous sensory impact. The visual experience of looking at the black-and-white paintings Riley had created between 1961 and 1966 was so overwhelming, its effect so immediate, that I felt I was being sucked into something. A new gravitational field in which a sense of sudden weightlessness had found its optical equal.

Fig 3. Bridget Riley, Bagatelle 3, 2015

Fig 4. Bridget Riley Studio

Almost forty years later, in 2008, I visited her major retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Bridget Riley – Rétrospective was an overview of her entire career, and it became immediately clear to me as I walked around there: the unique gravitational field I had previously experienced had become, if possible, even more intense. In the first rooms hung the most important paintings and drawings from before her black-and-white period, including the copy of Georges Seurat’s Le Pont de Courbevoie that Riley had made in 1959, and Pink Landscape from 1960, the year she travelled around Italy with her friend and mentor, the artist Maurice de Sausmarez, and saw the great exhibition of the Futurists at the Venice Biennale.

In those early paintings, that balance between warmth and precision already shines through: Riley’s highly inquisitive, disciplined way of seeing, of looking, always in relation to artistic technique, leading to a deeply layered work of art through great concentration. But however handsome, and full of clues about her later development, that early work in those first galleries hardly prepared the viewer for the steadfast self-assurance of her now legendary black-and-white paintings.