Bridget Riley Quotes

Painting is, I think, inevitably an archaic activity and one that depends on spiritual values.

- Bridget Riley

As a painter today you have to work without that essential platform. But if one does not deceive oneself and accepts this lack of certainty, other things may come into play.

- Bridget Riley

There was a time when meanings were focused and reality could be fixed; when that sort of belief disappeared, things became uncertain and open to interpretation.

- Bridget Riley

As the artist picks his way along, rejecting and accepting as he goes, certain patterns of enquiry emerge.

- Bridget Riley

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.

- Bridget Riley

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

- Bridget Riley

I used to build up to sensation, accumulating tension until it released a perceptual experience.

- Bridget Riley

Focusing isn't just an optical activity, it is also a mental one.

- Bridget Riley

An artist's early work is inevitably made up of a mixture of tendencies and interests, some of which are compatible and some of which are in conflict.

- Bridget Riley

For me nature is not landscape, but the dynamism of visual forces.

- Bridget Riley

His 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.

- Bridget Riley

I think this lack of a center has something to do with the loss of certainties that Christianity had to offer.

- Bridget Riley

I work with nature, although in completely new terms.

- Bridget Riley