43 Quotes by Bridget Riley

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.

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.

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.

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.

Painters have always needed a sort of veil upon which they can focus their attention. It’s as though the more fully the consciousness is absorbed, the greater the freedom of the spirit behind.

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.

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

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.