FEATURE // making ripples, making waves
32 British Patchwork & Quilting JULY 2019Bridget Riley made her name as an Op Artist in the Sixties
although she never liked the term. Op Art is a perceptual
and optical kinetic art that gives the illusion of vibration or
movement across a fl at surface. This happens when simple
shapes – lines, circles, curves, and squares – are repeated in
grid-like compositions and are then disrupted in some way;
a kink in a line or a rotation of a form, a change in a shape
that breaks the internal logic and sense of order. The art
historian Robert Hughes has written eloquently about this:
‘The essential subject of a work by Bridget Riley is not only
order but the thousand ways of subverting it’, and Michael
Bracewell has observed that in one of her exhibitions, ‘People
[were] moving from painting to painting as if to see what each
one ‘did’.’ The writer Will Self is less enthusiastic, calling the
paintings a kind of wallpaper and the ‘perfect decorations for
Modernist habitations and workspaces.’Whichever side you come down on, in the Sixties Riley was
making her way in a world dominated by white male painters
and theorists; she was a pioneering artist and ‘timelessly
modern’ creating work that has won her many awards. In
1968, she represented Great Britain in the Venice Biennale and
was the fi rst living British contemporary painter, and the fi rst
woman, to be awarded the International Prize for painting.Riley was born in Norwood, London, and lived in Lincolnshire,
the daughter of a printer. During the Second World War, her
father was called up to the army and she moved to Cornwall
with her mother and sister Sally. Her experience of the
elements and the natural landscape shaped her imagination
and inspired her later compositions. She remembers trips
to the sea, which was like ‘swimming through a diamond.’
Sunshine fl ecking and breaking the surface of water is an apt‘Over’, 1966. Emulsion on board, 101.50 x 101.30cm © Bridget Riley 2018. All rights reserved