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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I work with nature, although in completely new terms.

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.