Bridget Riley

Bridget Louise Riley (born 24 April 1931) is an English painter known for her op art paintings.

She lives and works in London, Cornwall and the Vaucluse in France.

Riley was born on 24 April 1931 in Norwood, London.

Her father, John Fisher Riley, originally from Yorkshire, had been an Army officer.

He was a printer by trade and owned his own business.

In 1938, he relocated the printing business, together with his family, to Lincolnshire.

At the beginning of World War II, her father, a member of the Territorial Army, was mobilised, and Riley, together with her mother and sister Sally, moved to a cottage in Cornwall.

They shared the cottage with an aunt who had studied at Goldsmiths' College, London and Riley attended talks given by a range of retired teachers and non-professionals.

She attended Cheltenham Ladies' College (1946–1948) and then studied art at Goldsmiths' College (1949–52), and later at the Royal College of Art (1952–55).

Between 1956 and 1959, she nursed her father, who had been involved in a serious car crash.

She suffered a breakdown due to the deterioration of her father's health.

After this she worked in a glassware shop.

Early in her career, Riley worked as an art teacher for children from 1957 to 1958 at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, Harrow (now known as Sacred Heart Language College).

At the Convent of the Sacred Heart, she began a basic design course.

The Whitechapel Gallery exhibition of Jackson Pollock in the winter of 1958 had an impact on her.

Her early work was figurative and semi-impressionist.

Between 1958 and 1959, her work at the advertising agency showed her adoption of a style of painting based on the pointillist technique.

Later she worked at the Loughborough School of Art (1959), Hornsey College of Art, and Croydon College of Art (1962–64).

As a young artist in 1959, Riley saw The Bridge at Courbevoie, owned by the Courtauld, and decided to paint a copy.

The resulting work has hung in Riley's studio ever since, barring its loan to the gallery for the exhibition, demonstrating in the opinion of the art critic Jonathan Jones "how crucial" Seurat was to her approach to art.

Riley described her copy of Seurat's painting as a "tool", interpreted by Jones as meaning that she, like Seurat, practised art "as an optical science"; in his view, Riley "really did forge her optical style by studying Seurat", making the exhibition a real meeting of old and new.

Around 1960, she began to develop her signature Op Art style consisting of black and white geometric patterns that explore the dynamism of sight and produce a disorienting effect on the eye and produces movement and colour.

In 1960, she visited Italy in the company of her mentor, the painter Lionel Maurice de Sausmarez and saw the Venice Biennale which was hosting a large exhibition of Futurist art.

Riley's mature style, developed during the 1960s, was influenced by sources like the French Neo-Impressionist artist Georges Seurat.

Jones comments that Riley investigated Seurat's pointillism by painting from a book illustration of Seurat's Bridge at an expanded scale to work out how his technique made use of complementary colours, and went on to create pointillist landscapes of her own, such as Pink Landscape (1960), painted soon after her Seurat study and portraying the "sun-filled hills of Tuscany" (and shown in the exhibition poster) which Jones writes could readily be taken for a post-impressionist original.

In his view, Riley shares Seurat's "joy for life", a simple but radical delight in colour and seeing.

It was during this period that Riley began to paint the black and white works for which she first became known.

They present a great variety of geometric forms that produce sensations of movement or colour.

In the early 1960s, her works were said to induce a variety of sensations in viewers, from seasickness to the feeling of sky diving.

In 1961, she and her partner Peter Sedgley visited the Vaucluse plateau in the South of France, and acquired a derelict farm which they eventually transformed into a studio.

From 1961 to 1964, she worked with the contrast of black and white, occasionally introducing tonal scales of grey.

Her paintings since 1961, have been executed by assistants.

She meticulously plans her composition's design with preparatory drawings and collage techniques; her assistants paint the final canvases with great precision under her instruction.

She eventually joined the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, as an illustrator, where she worked part-time until 1962.

Back in London, in the spring of 1962, Victor Musgrave of Gallery One held her first solo exhibition.

Works in this style comprised her first 1962 solo show at Musgrave's Gallery One, as well as numerous subsequent shows.

For example, in Fall, a single perpendiculars curve is repeated to create a field of varying optical frequencies.

Visually, these works relate to many concerns of the period: a perceived need for audience participation (this relates them to the Happenings, which were common in this era), challenges to the notion of the mind-body duality which led Aldous Huxley to experiment with hallucinogenic drugs; concerns with a tension between a scientific future which might be very beneficial or might lead to a nuclear war; and fears about the loss of genuine individual experience in a Brave New World.

In 1968, Riley, with Sedgley and the journalist Peter Townsend, created the artists' organisation SPACE (Space Provision Artistic Cultural and Educational), with the goal of providing artists large and affordable studio space.

In 2015–6, the Courtauld Gallery, in its exhibition Bridget Riley: Learning from Seurat, made the case for how Seurat's pointillism influenced her towards abstract painting.