BRIDGET RILEY

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For Bridget Riley, there are several essential premises to the creative process. Artists must work through their problems slowly and without shortcuts and welcome opposition to even their most prized ideas. As she wrote in a 2009 essay:

It can sometimes happen that, when confronted by what seems to be a wall, which one cannot get either through or round, a kind of radical reorientation is called for. Turning the whole thing over so that an approach can be made from the opposite side, as it were. If this is to succeed, it nearly always means relinquishing some cherished notion or something that you have relied on. This destructive side to creative life is essential to an artist’s survival.

A dextrous illusionist–and casual yet elegant Vogue luminary–Riley is known for her optical works and bold studies of color and geometric forms. Her creative process is rooted in drawing, which she considers “an inquiry, a way of finding out,” a defining mode of thinking we find both universal as an approach and idiosyncratic in result.

A massive retrospective of the British artist’s works has been touring the U.S. for the last few months, starting at the Art Institute of Chicago and landing now at the Hammer Museum. Those in Los Angeles can see Bridget Riley Drawings: From the Artist’s Studio through May 28 before it travels to The Morgan Library and Museum for a June 23 opening. 

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Riley, surrounded by her works, in 1963. Getty.

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THINK ABOUT

In that same essay, Riley wrote, “At the core of colour lies a paradox. It is simultaneously one thing and several things–you can never see colour by itself. It is always affected by other colours.” This relational understanding undergirds creative works of all disciplines, as well as the ways we consume art (i.e. our reading lives). How are the texts, paintings, or performances we witness influenced by and situated within our own intellectual genealogies?

INFLUENCES

Riley described reading E.M. Gombrich’s bestselling book The Story of Art as a 19-year-old student, which she said "pushed open the door on some of the greatest achievements of the human spirit."

Unsurprisingly, color theorist and modernist Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian and his abstract geometries, and pointillist pioneer Georges Seurat are frequently cited as influences.

READ MORE

Begin with The Eye’s Mind, which collects essays, interviews with the artist, and other writings from 1965, the year she rapidly rose to prominence, to 2019.

For a biography that delves into the ways the artist’s work and life are deeply entrenched, try Paul Moorhouse’s Bridget Riley: A Very Very Person.

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In January 1965 the international art world converged on New York to pay homage to a brilliant new star. The glittering opening of The Responsive Eye, a major exhibition of abstract painting at the Museum of Modern Art, signalled the latest phenomenon, op art – and its centre of attention was a young painter named Bridget Riley, whose dazzling painting Current appeared on the cover of the catalogue. Riley’s first solo show in New York sold out, and, following a feature in Vogue magazine, the Riley 'look' became a fashion craze. Overnight, she had become a sensation, yet only three years earlier, she was a virtual unknown. How did success arrive so suddenly?

Authored by the acclaimed curator and writer Paul Moorhouse, A Very Very Person is the first biography of Bridget Riley and addresses that tantalising question. Focusing on her early years, it tells the story of a remarkable woman whose art and life were entwined in surprising ways. This intimate narrative explores Riley’s wartime childhood spent in the idyllic Cornish countryside, her subsequent struggles to find her way as an artist, and the personal challenges she faced before finally arriving as one of the world’s most celebrated artists in Swinging Sixties London.