Bridget Riley Quotes

• 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.

  Bridget Riley

  Color, Identity, Events

  Bridget Riley (2009). “The Eye's Mind: Collected Writings 1965-2009”

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• Focusing isn't just an optical activity; it is also a mental one.

  Bridget Riley

  Focus, Activity

  Bridget Riley (2009). “The Eye's Mind: Collected Writings 1965-2009”

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• 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.

  Bridget Riley

  Failure, Artist, Doe

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• As the artist picks his way along, rejecting and accepting as he goes, certain patterns of enquiry emerge.

  Bridget Riley

  Artist, Enquiry, Patterns

  Bridget Riley (2009). “The Eye's Mind: Collected Writings 1965-2009”

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• 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.

  Bridget Riley

  Space, Games, Play

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• 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.

  Bridget Riley

  Thinking, Order, Magic

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• For me nature is not landscape, but the dynamism of visual forces.

  Bridget Riley

  Landscape, Force, Visuals

  Bridget Riley (2009). “The Eye's Mind: Collected Writings 1965-2009”

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• I work on two levels. I occupy my conscious mind with things to do, lines to draw, movements to organize, rhythms to invent. In fact, I keep myself occupied. But that allows other things to happen which I'm not controlling... the more I exercise my conscious mind, the more open the other things may find that they can come through.

  Bridget Riley

  Exercise, Two, Mind

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• I never make studies from nature. They would get in the way. I make use of my mind.

  Bridget Riley

  Mind, Use, Way

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• It seems the deeper, truer personality of the artist only emerges in the making of decisions... in refusing and accepting, changing and revising.

  Bridget Riley

  Artist, Choices, Personality

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• I learned from Seurat this important thing about colour and light, that 'a light' can be built from colour. I learned a great deal about interaction, that 'a blue' in different parts will play all sorts of different roles.

  Bridget Riley

  Play, Light, Blue

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• 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.

  Bridget Riley

  Moving, Eye, Mind

  Bridget Riley (2009). “The Eye's Mind: Collected Writings 1965-2009”

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• 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.

  Bridget Riley

  Moving, Eye, Events

  Bridget Riley, Arts Council of Great Britain (1984). “Working with colour: recent paintings and studies”

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• Painting is, I think, inevitably an archaic activity and one that depends on spiritual values.

  Bridget Riley

  Spiritual, Thinking, Painting

  Bridget Riley, Neil MacGregor, Robert Kudielka (1995). “Bridget Riley: dialogues on art”

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• Painting is a science pursued as an enquiry into the laws of nature...Observation is considered the key to natural science.

  Bridget Riley

  Keys, Law, Enquiry

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• I work with nature, although in completely new terms.

  Bridget Riley

  Term

  Bridget Riley (2009). “The Eye's Mind: Collected Writings 1965-2009”

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• 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.

  Bridget Riley

  Character, Way, Accepting

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• I used to build up to sensation, accumulating tension until it released a perceptual experience

  Bridget Riley

  Used, Tension, Sensations

  Bridget Riley (2009). “The Eye's Mind: Collected Writings 1965-2009”

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• 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.

  Bridget Riley

  Reality, Belief, Interpretation

  Bridget Riley (2009). “The Eye's Mind: Collected Writings 1965-2009”

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• 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.

  Bridget Riley

  Space, Focus, Painting

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• 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

  Bridget Riley

  Artist, Mixtures, Conflict

  Piet Mondrian, Bridget Riley, Haags Gemeentemuseum (1997). “Mondrian: nature to abstraction : from the Gemeentemuseum, the Hague”, Tate Gallery Pubn

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• 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.

  Bridget Riley

  Opening Up, Space, Way

  Bridget Riley (2009). “The Eye's Mind: Collected Writings 1965-2009”

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• 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.

  Bridget Riley

  Squares, Giving, Essentials

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• 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.

  Bridget Riley

  Art, School, Thinking

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• In my earlier paintings, I wanted the space between the picture plane and the spectator to be active.

  Bridget Riley

  Space, Painting, Planes

  Bridget Riley (2009). “The Eye's Mind: Collected Writings 1965-2009”

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