All language subtitles for Bridget Riley. Painting The Line (Sophie Deveson, 2021)

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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.