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She was absolutely revolutionary.

She moved art forward by about, I don't know, 500 years,

1,000 years, and no-one ever gave her the right credit for that.

A painter... Yes. ..first and foremost. And that's what I do.

What's most striking about her work is the extreme originality of it.

She was clearing the air, she was rinsing the eye.

The one thing people say, you can't look at it - it keeps moving

and jumping and it hurts your eyes. I'd hate to have it on my wall.

Well, that's not altogether relevant, is it?

Art has got other things to do besides being

comfortable to live with.

When I look at her work, I just sort of breathe it in, really.

I'm a big believer in art as experience,

so Bridget is one of the goddesses of this idea!

Please do not adjust your set.

It's difficult to name a living female artist who has had the impact

that Bridget has for such a prolonged period of time

and equally so consistently.

You can always stop.

Bridget Riley has spent 60 years pushing

the possibilities of painting.

Her dazzling experimental work invites us

to feel with our eyes and experience new ways of seeing.

Today, Riley is one of our greatest living artists and,

at the age of 90, shows no sign of stopping.

BBC cameras have been filming Bridget Riley over the past

few years, both at her studios in Cornwall and London, and for

the installation of her enormous mural in the National Gallery.

I met her at her studio in London for an extremely rare interview,

where I found out how Bridget Riley became Bridget Riley.

Many think of her as a poster girl for the swinging '60s,

others hail her as a titan of abstract art,

but Bridget herself tells a very different story.

I want to talk about your own early memories in Cornwall.

What do you remember about that? Um...

We had evacuated ourselves - my mother,

my sister and I and my father's sister.

He had gone to the war and was reported missing.

We lost him for many, many years. Mm-hm.

My mother had spent many holidays

and lived also in Cornwall as a child.

We had a very small cottage - four rooms.

I didn't go to school, not for...not for quite a long time,

which was very, very heavenly!

There was nowhere particularly to go or any reason to go there,

but it was beautiful. Mm-hm. We were not far from the coast.

We were there nearly five years, so there was, in fact,

nothing to do but look and enjoy and appreciate

and move around and walk in this extraordinarily beautiful landscape.

In 2017, Riley took BBC cameras back to Cornwall to retrace

the steps of her youth along the wild coastline.

Over there, that double gabled house with the white side

to it, is the old fish sellers, which my grandfather

bought in the 19th century and made into a family home.

Visits here, when I was young, during the war,

were very precious expeditions because you had to walk -

there was no petrol, no cars, no transport -

so one walked, which was the best way to see the landscape anyhow.

Did your mother and your aunt, who I knew had gone to Goldsmiths,

did they actually direct you, "this could be good for art"?

Or was it simply... No, no, no.

..look at this flower, look at that cloud? No. We'd go out for a walk.

It was something to do, and that's what we did.

But do you think it was then that you made

the foundations of an artistic personality?

Do you think that's where it came from? Yes, I do.

There are so many interlocking shapes and rhythms that,

while not exactly consciously thinking about,

do rise to the surface when you're drawing.

You see the patterns that, when the wave breaks, come right up?

Ha!

And curves round.

SHE LAUGHS

But all those overlapping, curving shapes of the tide, as it

comes up and turns round and goes back - just endlessly fascinating.

And it will never be the same again.

Every single unique, every single way,

every single breaking of the sea on the rocks has never happened

again exactly like that and has never happened before.

Riley nurtured her interest in art at Cheltenham Ladies' College

and by spending hours in the National Gallery in London.

She was classically trained at Goldsmiths and then at

the Royal College of Art, where her classmates included

Peter Blake, Frank Auerbach and John Bratby.

When I was a student at the Royal College of Art,

and there was all the alumni's work on the wall, so I had to sit and

invigilate next to Bridget Riley's work,

and so I was just constantly staring at her work,

and her student work was a portrait of a woman done in a very

sort of Cezanney type style, really, and no-one would ever, ever,

ever possibly believe that it was Bridget Riley's,

but it was painted very well. She could paint.

She could have painted however she wanted -

she chose to paint the way that she does.

She moved her mind from being like an average student who could

paint well into a phenomenal artist that did something really

ground-breaking and seminal.

Well, this one was what I...

..the ones I did at Goldsmiths.

This is a girl sitting on the white pillow.

That was at the Royal College, and I can boast that they're very,

very different but there's something about that one I prefer.

Riley left art college in 1955, highly skilled

but unsure of her style or subject.

She spent some time teaching, working in a shop,

nursing her father and suffering ill health herself.

She also worked as an illustrator at an advertising agency.

But it was in the work of French post-impressionist painter

Georges Seurat that she discovered a pursuit that would become her

lifelong passion - rethinking the very nature of perception itself.

She talked to the BBC about him in 1979.

I think one of the things that's most appealing about him

was that he wanted the new,

he wanted tremendously to be a modern artist in his, um...to, er...

And science was actually the new excitement of the time,

and he wanted to embrace this, to weld it into art,

to draw on it through, you know, resources. What I love...

You said about Seurat... Mm.

..that you learned method from him, but not his method.

You learned method from him. Yes.

And what is that method, then,

of building up your colour, of tonality?

The induction of colour, that is

that colour can induce something it's not, on both levels -

in actuality, as a pigment,

and in the proximity and its interaction with what's next to it.

Or when it's in a big field.

So it's an immense, essentially unstable but,

because of that, hugely exciting field to work with.

Riley explored Seurat's technique by faithfully copying

one of his paintings.

One of the things that I found

when I copied it was that he must have worked over the entire surface.

For instance, with the blues, I think

he must have worked over all the blue tendencies,

and then with the pinks and with the greens and with the yellows.

This black has orange, red...

..blue, green, altogether

blending into a vibrant black, not a dead black, but a vibrant black.

Not a dead black, but a vibrant black.

Riley pursued Seurat's pointillist style,

most notably in her 1960 work Pink Landscape,

but she explained in 2019

how disappointed she was with the results.

Although it was competent and the best I could do...

..I did feel that it did not convey

what I had experienced

when I was looking at the valley

over in Siena

under the sizzling heat.

And what I had not got

was the sensation...

..And so I'd missed it.

I'd missed the most important thing.

The sensation of the heat,

the shimmer, the dazzle,

the glitter of light.

And I wondered really what I had been doing.

I'd been going up a wrong path.

However, this failure was a key turning point in Riley's career,

finally giving her the sense of direction

she'd been craving since art college.

When I started then to work from the pictorial elements themselves

to find out what they could do

when they were no longer serving a purpose,

but just for themselves,

which was experimental.

I began a long process of finding out,

and with the finding out,

I would find a sensation

which I recognised, something I'd experienced before in nature.

And it was not just Riley and her art

that were hurtling in a different direction.

As the '60s dawned, cultural and social barriers

were being dismantled by a post-war generation hungry for change.

Do you think art has helped you understand the world,

that shaped your understanding of the world?

Yes, I do, actually.

I think that artists have...

Painters have borne witness...

It's one of the tasks, so to speak.

..to changing circumstances

and events, to horrors

as well as to wonders.

And so they held a mirror up...

..to human nature

and reported, you know...

..faithfully.

I grew up in the 1950s,

which in provincial England

was really a visual blackout.

I mean, there was absolutely nothing to look at.

British art was very stagnant, really.

It was a stagnant pond.

Bridget had a wonderful phrase for it.

"Infectious apathy and vicious insularity,"

and the minute I read that phrase,

I recognised, "That is the world I grew up in,"

certainly so far as the arts were concerned.

I knew we were living in the 20th century,

but there was no visual evidence of that

so far as the art world was concerned.

So Bridget's first task - that of her whole generation

but, in a sense, she spearheaded it -

was to blow up,

to dynamite,

this very...

This world of preconceptions, of received views, of tired eyes.

The epicentre of the burgeoning contemporary art scene

was the Whitechapel Gallery in London,

where director Bryan Robertson broadened the horizons

of British artists like Bridget Riley.

It was the Whitechapel,

which showed those, among marvellous American painters,

the abstract expressionist Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock.

They all had solo shows at the Whitechapel

and what Bryan did...

First of all, he chose and curated those shows.

Bridget Riley herself said, "He gave us confidence,"

which was very necessary in those days.

He gave them the sense that they could operate on the same scale

and that they didn't have to...

They didn't have to take a backseat.

That they, too, could do things as powerful, as intense,

as original, as expressive

of how it felt to be alive at that time.

And this was a completely new concept in British art,

and we lived just up the road from Bridget.

When she'd finished a painting,

we, my husband and I, were very often the...

She would ring us up just to come and see, you know,

a painter in his studio or her studio,

when a thing is actually finished does like an outside eye on it.

So we had that pleasure and privilege

of sitting and looking at many of those blacks and whites

as soon as they were finished.

It was an extraordinary experience.

Inspired by the abstract expressionists

and Italian futurists,

Riley exploded onto the art scene

at the age of 30 with dazzling black and white paintings

that were like nothing that had ever been seen before.

It's interesting to think about whether it was shocking or not

because, in a sense, it was,

but it was accessible.

I remember Kiss.

That, I first saw in the gallery.

It's a painting of 1961

from Bridget's first show when she really hit her stride.

It just amazed me.

I'd never seen anything like it.

I suddenly realised that, to represent the 20th century,

you couldn't go on using worn-out 19th century conventions.

My paintings are not concerned with the romantic legacy of expression,

nor with fantasies, concepts or symbols.

I draw from nature.

I work with nature.

Although in completely new terms.

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 colour and form

as ultimate identities,

freeing them from all descriptive or functional roles.

You talked about a shift in your work from perceptual orientation

to one of sensation, but you have a sensation

in front of your paintings that doesn't always, for me anyway,

constitute abstract because you have a huge emotional engagement

with your paintings.

So do you think "abstract" is the right word for you,

as an artist?

You're ALWAYS called an abstract artist.

I... No, I don't know...

I don't know that it is.

I don't... I don't...

I think it's the one we use at the moment, and so I go along with it.

But if somebody said I was an abstract artist,

I would say, "That isn't a possibility."

Perhaps I explore and I try to understand,

and try to find out what I can look at, what can be seen.

Movement in squares was one small change

slowly, slowly building on,

building on, building on, building on

until it accelerated into a rapid movement in the square.

It shuttled almost to extinction

and then it would have closed the painting.

There wouldn't have been anything there.

I could do nothing but come back.

I didn't have to go the whole way back,

but some of the way back and...

..the next painting, which was Black To White Discs,

I wanted to slow the whole thing down.

And I realised if you made it larger,

it would slow it down even more.

So, in this way, involuntarily,

almost, I began to...

..discover that I was actually working with my own sight...

Mm-hm. ..your sight, the viewer's sight...

..and this gave us a..

That was the basis of communication.

In making work that is about what it feels like to look at something,

Riley's paintings are truly interactive.

Each one completed by the viewer's own perception.

You finish a painting and send it out into the world.

To me, it's like pushing a boat out into the sea.

It's on its own from now,

a thing in the world,

present.

It must do the best it can

by itself,

which is to offer an experience,

offer a possibility.

It is funny because you do feel

like you've entered a different space.

It's kind of weird. It is odd.

It's like a different room.

It's a sort of weird, sci-fi room...

..with maths in it.

The first thing that hits you

is just how you respond to it viscerally.

Because I try... I suppose I try and judge everything by,

"Does it bypass my brain and hit me there?"

And if it does, then I'm interested, you know.

It's about allowing us to see differently

and to understand differently.

And if we can do that,

then you can accept all the differences around you.

Rhythm and repetition are at the root of movement.

They create a situation within which

the most simple, basic forms

start to become visually active.

By massing them and repeating them,

they become more fully present.

Repetition acts as a sort of amplifier for visual events,

which scene singly would hardly be visible.

But to make these basic forms release

the full visual energy within them,

they have to breathe, as it were, to open and close...

..or to tighten up and then relax.

A rhythm that's alive has to do with changing pace

and feeling how the visual speed can expand and contract.

Sometimes go slower

and sometimes go faster.

The whole thing must live.

It's not obvious what the subject is at all.

It's way more sensory, I suppose.

I we sometimes it makes you feel uneasy, to be honest.

And sometimes, it's a crass thing to say,

but it makes your eyes go funny.

It's not mischief.

I don't want to say, "I'm just being mischievous."

It's a field of exploration.

But it also creates movement in the paintings...

Of course it does because... ..and excitement.

Yes, it does because this is an event happening,

something is happening.

Painting is like music, and it's easier if you think of it

in those terms.

Exactly as with music, you can describe it in terms of metaphors,

you can say what it makes you feel like,

but the actual feeling is what's happening.

And I think music is a much easier way of thinking about one's response

to Bridget's paintings than...

..art criticism, shall we say?

Look at the titles of her early paintings -

Tremor, Shift, Hesitate, Fall, Deny, Blaze.

You know, they themselves,

I know they're only titles, but they give you some sense

of what's going on in the pictures.

It's brilliant that she titles them because a lot of artists

that make really hardcore, minimal work,

it's always untitled with the title in brackets or untitled

with a number, untitled B49 or something,

and it's great that she titles the work

because you then definitely are given a clue that

there is an emotional impact in them.

Riley's bold new style coincided with the op art craze

of the early 1960s.

Mind-bending art use patterns to create optical illusions

and was lapped up by an audience hungry for psychedelic experiences.

The "op art" label follows Riley around to this day,

but she has always identified with a much older artistic tradition.

The one period that people talk about you having

ambivalence towards is the whole op art time,

that you were associated with op art.

Was it really almost against your will,

or was it just a timing issue?

It was more a timing issue.

I think, actually, how we see and perception

was obviously a major plank

in the development of impressionism and post impressionism,

and the whole modern art movement.

So actually, op art is...was a blip,

so to speak on the side.

I mean, I think Cezanne said, "We need a new optics."

When he found that, what he actually experienced...

..didn't measure up to the organisation of pictorial space.

It was a blockbuster exhibition of op art

at the Museum of Modern Art in New York

that sealed Riley's reputation as a major international artist.

However, she found the fame that followed uncomfortable

as her art flowed from galleries onto high streets,

defining the look of an entire era.

Bridget has often expressed to me her unhappiness

about what happened with the commercialisation of her work,

which was done without her permission

when she, you know, she arrived in New York

and saw dresses in Bloomingdales

which had her...

Basically with patterns coming from her paintings,

understandably very distressing.

How do you feel when you walk down the street and you see...? Um...

A bit sick.

When your art was displayed alongside '60s fashion and so forth,

you didn't see that as being

something that you particularly enjoyed.

I didn't have much of a chance

to say anything about my work.

Right.

And I think, in fact, it was a failure to understand.

A failure to understand your artistic endeavour

versus somebody's...

..op art mini skirt.

It was a very serious exhibition.

I think the museum lost control of it.

People were very excited about it

because they did sense,

quite rightly, that there was a big field here, a huge opportunity...

..for really, a new look at things

and it just it just felt, it was too much.

That idea of an exhibition being that popular,

of contemporary art, that may have been the first one

where there was that kind of big popular response

and so nobody was really prepared for it.

There's a sort of pressure which artists haven't had to put up with.

I mean, you know, there is a philosophy since the 19th century

of failure which protects an artist.

There's a moral equation between failure and value...

..and we've got geared to this.

Well, now we've got this problem of success

and there's no actual philosophy do to cope.

We've got to evolve one.

And I think this is going to be one of the problems.

In your long career,

artistic dilemmas, you've only done,

3D once.

Tell me about that.

Well, that came about

when the National Gallery bought

a big water lily painting.

It was a big painting and you are enveloped in it visually,

and I thought I would make a big painting,

which enveloped you physically.

That was a great mistake.

That was too literal, absolutely too literal,

so I went back to flat painting

and engaging you on painting's proper condition,

which is flat and open.

But if you hadn't done that,

you wouldn't have known that that's where you wanted to be

and so is there ever such a thing as a mistake or is it just...?

Oh, no, you're quite right.

In a way there's not.

And as Matisse said, "Don't get rid of your mistakes."

Meaning, you know, that they are the things

that will help you to get to move

and to think, and to understand...

..a little bit more about what you're doing.

Riley introduced pure colour

to her paintings in 1967.

When you moved from black and white,

that was momentous for you.

Well, I was heading towards it,

but it had been a slow and gradual approach

through tone

and through drawing and life drawing before that.

Of course,

colour as light and colour as paint behave in quite different ways.

It was artists like Monet and Seurat

who taught us to make paint behave as light does

by dividing up the colour on the canvas

so that it works optically,

only mixing in the actual process of seeing it.

Seeing it is when the painting starts to live,

that is when it begins.

Everything else is like setting the stage

before the curtain goes up on the drama itself.

I really like her use of colour,

and the fact that it's not narrative,

or is not for me.

It looks deceptively simple, you know, her sort of work

where you go, "It's just a lot of stripes," and it's not.

Or think it's been printed or something, you know,

and when you take a closer look, it's, you know, done by hand.

And so there's a lot of love and care gone into something

that ostensibly has no story

and is not a person,

it's not a sort of classical Greek tale or something.

Colours are absolutely interdependent.

What is literally on the canvas is not all you can see.

It's only the springboard which makes you see more.

I was at Bridget's studio once looking at a stripe painting,

and I noticed, incredibly, that each stripe seemed to have

this very narrow black edge to it...

..and I thought, "God, that must be impossible to paint."

And I asked her about it and she said,

"No, actually, that's just in your mind.

"This is something Leonardo discovered,

"that when you put two colours together

"that have a certain relationship on the colour spectrum,

"your mind fills in...

"..a dark line."

Riley chose no smaller stage on which to debut her move to colour

than the 1968 Venice Biennale,

when she was selected to represent Great Britain

alongside sculptor Phillip King.

The gamble paid off,

and she became the first British contemporary painter

and the first woman to be awarded the international prize

for painting at the Biennale.

I think it must have come as a great surprise to a lot of people

that this young British woman artist

who is making this work

that some people maybe associated with op art,

which had been popularised in a way

that sometimes makes art people nervous

that their little sanctuary is...

..getting taken over by the barbarians.

So it must have been something that,

like Bridget's paintings, unsettled a few people.

On the other hand, if you really were serious

about painting in 1968...

..I can't really think of any other artist

who was more deserving of winning a prize like that than Bridget.

In the same year as Riley's triumph at the Venice Biennale,

she and fellow artist Peter Sedgley created the Space.

It was 1968, the Year of Revolution,

and Riley had a radical idea

inspired by the artist studios she'd seen in New York.

Space would take over empty warehouses

to create a utopian community of artists with more space to work.

When I came to Britain, I realised

that many, many artists work basically at home.

They had maybe the basement of the house

or the main room of the house was like...

They were... The studios were in domesticated spaces

because there weren't, at that time,

obvious other spaces to use as studios.

I was in the first Space studio, which was at St Katharine's Docks.

I remember it as bitterly cold in the winter.

Freezing, howling wind.

It's interesting looking back

because this was not something that was self-serving.

It wasn't serving her.

She was already successful enough

and had, you know, had enough money

to be able to have proper studio space.

It was really providing space for people like myself

who, you know, if you couldn't rent very modest spaces,

you didn't have one.

And so it served a fantastic function

and, particularly during the late '60s

and then through the '70s and '80s,

these were particularly important.

The scheme still goes on.

Space Studios has over 600 artists...

..having studios that they may be share in London

through disused buildings.

Those steps need governmental support

and also private enterprise to take a hand.

You see, it's a marvellous studio.

Bigger space made for bigger paintings and, during the '70s,

Riley's work became more expansive and increasingly curvy.

Her reputation grew, too,

and, in 1971, she had her first retrospective exhibited

in Germany, Italy and then London.

Bridget had her first show at the Hayward 50 years ago,

1971,

and apparently the first guy waiting to buy a ticket was Francis Bacon.

You know you think, "OK, who are the great British tradition

"of painting that Bridget Riley might fit in?"

Probably the last person you think of is Francis Bacon.

But Bacon apparently said to Bridget that...

..he had always thought the only way

you could really unsettle and disturb a viewer

was by distorting and deforming the human body and face.

That he'd learned from Bridget's paintings

that actually there was a completely different way to do it

where you didn't even depict the human form.

You just made paintings that could destabilise people's perceptions.

A far cry from the Cornish coast and the work of Seurat,

the ancient art of Egypt and its fixed palette of just five colours

triggered another turning point in Riley's career

during a visit there in 1979.

However, she was initially wary

of putting her experience into her work.

I did hesitate

because I felt that perhaps this was stealing.

It belonged to them.

I shouldn't touch it.

Then I thought of Picasso,

and I thought he would have thought

this was ridiculous inhibition on my part

and so I should respond.

So, I put away all...

..the postcards, photographs,

everything that I had brought back

and from...

..remembered sensations,

I put together my version of the Egyptian palette.

What I did discover after Egypt

was not only the colours, but the way that the Egyptians

organised their flat surfaces

in what you might call a processional manner,

that is to say their majestic figures walked across the areas.

And in a sense, I had the same feeling

that these colours proceed with a certain measure of pace.

After a while, I felt I had exhausted the possibilities

of what I could do within the stripe format

and that I was very, very constricted

in a kind of prison. I had to break out of it.

I wanted to be able to move the eye

in a wider variety of ways

around the canvas.

In Gentle Edge,

I crossed some of the bands with a narrow diagonal hatching.

This began to break down the structure.

Working with her Egyptian palette,

Riley supersized her work yet further,

creating enormous murals for hospitals in Liverpool and London

between 1983 and 2014.

I'd visited my mother so many times in hospital in Cornwall,

so I certainly wanted...

..to contribute something to the hospital,

but I didn't know how.

I knew it should be colour,

I knew it should evoke life outside the hospital.

The most important thing.

And that to some extent meant skies, seas, fields,

nature as we most generally understand it.

But how to articulate that was very, very puzzling.

It's funny that hospital paintings of Bridget's have tended to be these

really long horizontal lines,

which do suggest a kind of continuity...

..which, maybe if you're in a hospital,

is a nice thing to think about.

In the early '80s,

Riley found her style at odds with the aesthetic excesses

of the new decade

as the focus in art shifted to neo expressionist works

by the likes of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Julian Schnabel.

There's a great variety for Bridget Riley.

There's the huge exhibition at the Hayward,

but you also have much smaller exhibitions

where, for example, in Ayrshire, in Ayr.

That must have been the beginning of the '80s.

People were not liking my work very much.

They weren't... It was doldrums

and that does... Must happen and does happen

in a painter's life, you know?

And so I was very glad of the chance to go somewhere else,

and I went up there and...

..gave a talk.

There were 15 people in the audience,

but they asked me such good questions.

We had a ball.

We had a great, great time.

I thought we wouldn't find this gallery,

but they said, "Oh, yes, you will, we'll signpost it."

And so they got the AA to put up signs

saying "Bridget Riley Exhibition."

Riley stuck to her guns

and continued to experiment with shapes and colours.

She experienced a renaissance in the 1990s

and, in 2017, created her largest work to date

at a contemporary art museum in Texas -

revisiting the Egyptian palette she'd used

in the Royal Liverpool University Hospital over 30 years earlier.

The best piece of work of hers I ever saw

was that the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Donald Judd's foundation,

and it's, like, this amazing...

This is out in the desert.

And there's just like this sort of kind of ex army base

and, on the walls, there's just a stripe

that goes... These stripes that just go all the way around.

And so you see the stripes

and then you see the windows with the desert in the background.

It is phenomenal, it's fantastic, and it makes you understand

about Bridget Riley's big ideas.

She wasn't painting a picture.

She's not painting an area.

She's painting a whole idea.

Just before the mural was unveiled in Texas,

Riley gave BBC cameras access to her London studio

to discuss her process in making a work more than 120 metres long.

I often make notes...

..to just helped me think something through

and here I've got one before the

black bumper bar is put in,

in which I've taken...

..one square of blue out of here

and put it into two... Another square of yellow down there.

I don't know what it looked like,

but it was a thought.

It's an architecture of art.

You know, this is not just painting in the studio

solely from one subject,

but it's an immersion in something completely different,

and it's, you know, it gets to the core of what Bridget does so well.

She's looking at form, she's looking at intellectual approaches to art,

she's immersing herself in writing about abstract painting

and literature, and poetry.

I mean, it's a complete myriad of different things.

In recent years, Riley has returned to the sort of black and white work

she was making in the '60s,

once again drawing on nature for inspiration.

The curves and movement of this row of Tamarisk trees,

which the wind seems to pick up a series of waves,

almost, as a dancing freeze.

The wind is such a big force down here, does draw sometimes

with the landscape,

just draws patterns of indescribable beauty.

When there's a little breeze that will come,

especially if the long grasses pick up on, you know,

a rhythm that repeats across as the breeze goes.

I thought that you might like to see this

because, yesterday, when we were by the sea

and walking along the Tamarisk lane,

there was a kind of cross movement of light and shade,

and light and shade, which certainly did not in any way

consciously inspire this painting

but as part of the many sensations

of walking and passing by things,

there is a movement in it,

quite elusive, of gathering dark...

..and giving way to light lighter passages.

Nature is the origin and feeds what I make,

but it's not direct

and so one does not lead straight to the other.

If I know what I'm going to get...

..I lose interest.

I need just a little small connecting point

from the present known that I have in the studio...

..to an unknown that lies just beyond

what I have already seen.

This experience of say of looking at a painting

and seeing one type of order...

..and then suddenly seeing that order switch

and you see another arrangement

within these shapes and forms on a canvas,

then it switches again.

That's something anyone who's ever looked at a body of moving water

in the sunlight understands,

this constant making of

patterns that then fall apart and reform again.

We all share these kinds of experiences in our memory,

and I think sometimes some of the things that Bridget makes,

the experiences she creates,

the sensations that her paintings

allow us to access

can recall some of those moments.

How important to you...

..is it that many people experience your work?

You know, if it's in public spaces

and I wonder what you feel like when you go through a public space

where you've made a beautiful piece of work and it's appreciated.

Do you get a sense of pride every time you see it?

Well, yes. I have had a great treat

in that I was invited to do something

for the Annenberg Court,

the Getty Entrance to the National Gallery

AND I must admit, I have longed to do something about it

for years and years and years.

You didn't say, "Can I have that wall over there?

"Can I have that wall over there?" No, no, no.

The gallery has such a lot to offer.

If people could only find a way of,

in a way, daring to come and have a look at it.

And your work is what welcomes them in.

It's very unusual, at the National Gallery,

that we ask an artist to produce something

that is essentially permanent.

There are one or two precedents, but it's fairly rare.

Riley's enormous mural, entitled Messengers,

was installed in 2019

when she revealed how its title was inspired by the clouds

in a painting by John Constable.

It was a wonderful moment.

It's such a fantastic painting.

You can see the light falling from the clear blue sky above

on these upper parts of all these clouds,

and you can see the darker ones underneath,

these little detached things of messengers.

This is a messenger, I think, going across there.

What it does in the whole painting is it creates,

helps to create, a huge feeling of space.

And that's where the title came from?

Suddenly, it was a sort of eureka moment

where Messengers kind of emerged?

Yes, it was simply wonderful.

I particularly like it when it's very bright and you're seeing it

from sort of further back, and it's really glowing.

And I think when it's like that,

you get that sense of these discs floating on this white background

and you also get these after images.

So the whole of Messengers is sort of moving in front of your eyes.

It's almost like it's dancing.

You need to devote a little bit of time to it.

It's very enjoyable.

I think it's very uplifting.

In the same year as Messengers was unveiled,

the Hayward Gallery in London hosted another

major Riley retrospective, almost 50 years since her first one there.

We live in the era of the drive-by gallery visit

where people just kind of cruise by and look at this thing here

and look at that thing there.

And one of the wonderful things about Bridget Riley's show

is that the audiences are actually looking

really carefully at everything they see...

..partly because their experience of looking

is changing as they're looking.

Her works really seem to change the space you're looking at.

They seem to come off the wall

and enter the space you're in,

and you can't really get that from looking at an image on a phone

or a computer, or in a book even.

Riley's interest in creating a fresh way of seeing

roots her very modern work in an artistic tradition

stretching back centuries.

Bridget is arguably one of the artists most steeped in the history

of art, and I think that's the most interesting thing about her lineage

is that she's taken all of this work,

she's really studied it and looked at it critically, analytically,

artistically, but put it into her own language.

My work has certainly drawn

on the work of painters in the past.

I've enjoyed enormously...

..exhibitions at the National Gallery.

I've travelled to see paintings in other countries,

and I would say the past painting

has given me a lot of friends.

Some of the figures, say, that are Bridget's kind of Hall of Fame

in terms of artists who, like her, were really interested in

research and analysis, and the colour, and colour relationships.

And there are some great 19th century French artists,

including Cezanne and Seurat, and Monet.

And then in the 20th century,

I think Mondrian, who was then taking more of a

stripped-down geometric idea of colour relationships.

When I look at Bridget's work,

I see her connectedness with the great art of the past

has been, in its radicality, in its uniqueness,

I don't see it as with some artists as a clear derivation

of something, in the spirit

of what happened is like what

Picasso did, or what Cezanne did.

What Seurat did.

It's not in the appearance of the work at all.

It's in that spirit of invention and innovation.

Another radical who inspired Riley

was Masaccio, the most revolutionary painter of the Renaissance.

Masaccio laid a foundation stone of Western painting...

..and as I'm a western painter, we're at each end of the tradition.

He's interested in light very differently, of course, from me

but we do both have an interest

in light, in surface,

in different notions of depth.

Although superficially, it might look as though we're very different,

we share many painterly interests.

Something else the renaissance inspired in Riley

is the use of a studio of assistants,

something that was unheard of for a painter in the 1960s.

What Bridget was doing was something much closer to what say

a sculptor does when commissioning a large work.

When Henry Moore was working, he didn't make the bronze sculptures

that we know him for.

He made maquettes, he made...

He made models from which other people executed

the work that we say is his, that is his,

and in a sense, that's similar to what Bridget was doing.

Today, many, many artists use other people to make works,

and we take that for granted,

but when Bridget first started doing that,

that was a very, very radical thing.

In a sense, I get drawn too much

into the actual execution

and I have to be detached.

I have seen how the thing

can take shape in study form

and in cartoon form and in decision-making.

I think, for Bridget, who is a really, really serious,

serious, serious, serious artist

and I think if we knew the background behind every painting,

behind every colour wave, behind every mood and every emotion,

we wouldn't be able to feel it ourselves.

We would be pressurised by her emotions.

And it's better that we look at it and we feel the vibrations,

we feel the emotion through the colour,

we understand it for how we feel, not how she felt.

At the start of a painting,

I don't know the end of it.

And as long as I know the point of origin,

the initial problem, which is an intellectual one...

Are you confident that the way you are working in at the moment

is going to provide you with that?

Well, if it doesn't, it's a lack of my insight.

It's a failure on my part.

The vein itself is rich enough...

..for me and for, I think, several lifetimes of work.

Oh, heavens, yes.

But whether I continue to...

..have the clarity and the lucidity to perceive what I'm doing

is another matter.

Do you see things that you didn't see before, when you look back

at your paintings, maybe from 40 or 50 years?

Do you look at them differently?

Not always.

Sometimes they're entirely old friends.

Other times, I see things in them

which I didn't intend,

didn't see, didn't hope for,

didn't... Weren't, apparently.

And that, you know, is very tempting.

And so especially when I think that,

you know, with the time that I have still,

I want to make the most use of it

and actually explore further

some of the possibilities I see.

Almost 60 years after her first solo show,

Bridget Riley is still innovating, painting, publishing and exhibiting.

She has won numerous prestigious awards

and was made a companion of honour in 1998.

I think she's a phenomenal woman,

phenomenal artist,

and the fact that she keeps going and keeps going is fantastic.

She was ground-breaking and she did something seminal within art,

so people only look at that

and think of that, and they think that it's, like,

one idea, like something you know that anyone could do.

"Do some stripes." Let them try and do, let them try and invent it.

Let them try and believe in it.

Let them pursue it for the rest of their life and see how far they get.

You know, Bridget Riley's dedication and focus is pretty phenomenal.

What she has avoided is the pitfall

of trying to be commercially highly successful

at the expense of her longevity.

There it is, the Bridget Riley,

and I'm going to start with some interest here.

There is a considerable growth in the value of her pictures.

Currently, the record price at auction is over £4 million.

At £1,250,000.

Please, thank you. It's ironic in a way that Bridget,

now at the age that she is,

should be, you know, almost one of the newer hot artists.

And she's firmly in this kind of grouping

of great 20th century kind of British female artists now

and enjoying great success alongside younger artists

like Cecily Brown or Tracey Emin, for example.

More than anything, she didn't want to be thought of as a woman artist.

She did not want to be singled out because of her sex.

She'd completely understand her wish for that at the time.

But from the first day I was in art school,

through all of my years of teaching,

a minimum of 50% of the students were women.

But the number who actually succeeded to build careers

was tiny in comparison,

certainly not so much.

Today, we see a giant change, over the last 20 years.

But for many, many years,

that was not the case.

I think Bridget's achievement as a woman artist in Britain

is absolutely phenomenal.

You said, in 2009, for the last 50 years, it has been my belief

that, as a modern artist, you should make a contribution

to the art of your time,

even if it's only a small one.

So what do you think your contribution has been?

I couldn't be... I couldn't say.

That's for other people to.

Very modest.

No, it's just as I wouldn't know.

She's shown that the tradition of art isn't static.

It isn't dead.

There aren't people, for the most part,

who are trying to paint like Bridget.

It's not a question of a school of Riley kind of thing.

She's created this incredible example

of what can be done with the most minimal means

and yet sometimes this incredibly playful,

but also explosive, effect.

I suppose I hope that, when you ask me if I could make a contribution,

that I'm hoping that I can,

in some way, to order, stability,

even to pleasure,

to have joy of living.

The great privilege we have in being alive.