Bridget Riley Quotes

23 quotes in 320 categories

• Focusing isn't just an optical activity; it is also a mental one.
• 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…
• 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…
• Painting is, I think, inevitably an archaic activity and one that depends on spiritual values.
• I work with nature, although in completely new terms.
• In my earlier paintings, I wanted the space between the picture plane and the spectator to be active.
• For me nature is not landscape, but the dynamism of visual forces.
• I couldn’t get near what I wanted through seeing, recognizing and recreating, so I stood the problem on its head. I started studying squares, rectangles,…
• The eye can travel over the surface in a way parallel to the way it moves over nature. It should feel caressed and soothed, experience…
• As the artist picks his way along, rejecting and accepting as he goes, certain patterns of enquiry emerge.
• 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,…
• I used to build up to sensation, accumulating tension until it released a perceptual experience
• I think this lack of a center has something to do with the loss of certainties that Christianity had to offer
• 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…
• Painting is a science pursued as an enquiry into the laws of nature...Observation is considered the key to natural science.
• I never make studies from nature. They would get in the way. I make use of my mind.
• 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,…
• 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…

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