Bridget Riley.

Monday morning: It is colder today, only 2 degrees C, but on the + side there isn’t a cloud in the cobalt blue sky. I haven’t written anything for a few days, so I’ll write whatever comes into my head, just to say something. I have only been awake for ten minutes. The clock in my bedroom isn’t working because I’m too lazy to put a new battery in it, but these days I always seem to come downstairs at 9.30, regardless of when I went to bed. I'm thinking about Bridget Riley. The simple explanation is because the last thing I did last night was watch a documentary about her on BBC 4. I watched it twice actually. It was on BBC2 on Friday evening as well. I found it by accident when I reached for the remote to get away from that Children In Need annual thing. I think I watched it twice because I wanted to understand what Bridget was all about. She is an incredible lady, 90 now, but still full of energy and keen to find out where her art will take her next. 

I’ll tell you the little I know about Bridget Riley in case you haven’t heard of her. I won’t look on Wikipedia or google though. In the documentary she was interviewed by Kirsty Wark. There were others who talked about her work such as Tracey Emin who was full of praise for Bridget. I think Bridget first came to be noticed in the 1950s, but it took her a while to develop her own vision and style. She was influenced by a French artist called Georges Suerat who had a technique called pointillism. Bridget became associated in the 60s with an art movement called Op-Art. The Op is short for optical I would presume. Some of her paintings cause optical illusions in the eyes of the viewer. She paints squares, triangles, circles, curves and stripes, beginning mainly with black and white but developing later with bright vivid colours. Some of her ideas were stolen in the swinging sixties by the fashion world of Carnaby Street and places like that. 

Bridget has been commissioned to paint huge murals, for places such as museums and entire corridors of hospital wards. Although the work is quite mathematical in design, you can see how it is based in nature. For instance, many artists have painted a view of the sea, but in Bridget’s work you can actually experience the movement of the sea. Other works have the shimmering effect of heat. I’d love to go to a Bridget Riley exhibition to experience the paintings for myself. I also think that understanding Bridget’s work could be a lot easier than people think. The bright colours could simply be a celebration of the joy of being alive. I bet a lot of people leave a Bridget Riley exhibition feeling happier and more optimistic without knowing why. If an artist can achieve just that one thing, then their work has been worthwhile.

ps, I stole the illustrations from Google Images. I hope nobody minds.