Bridget Riley

Appreciation - and the diagonals
In looking for titles for my cut paper hangings that point to their poetic aspect, I have turned to Bridget Riley's diagonal lozenge paintings which I saw for the first time at her Tate Britain show in 2003. Several galleries of them, huge, immersive in the field of colour and light that they projected.  I don't think I have ever been filled with such joy by an exhibition: the dynamic of the upward-tilting shapes, the play with the geometry (lozenges slipping out of their columns), the interactions of so much saturated colour - and then the titles, which release  the paintings from pure forms into the natural world. With lyrical simplicity, as in 'From here', 'Ease', 'New Day', 'High Sky','Reflection', 'Shade', 'June'.  

I am recognising how influential she has been on me.  Her aesthetic: clear, beautiful, an appeal to the senses, an engagement with the phenomenon of perception.  Her gender: one of the few women artists who gained recognition and standing as early as the sixties. Her staying power: how she's kept going for over fifty years now, constantly evolving.  In my studio I have pinned up right in front of where I work a photo of her standing in her studio in front of one of her more recent curvy paintings, with beneath a quote from her:

    Those who continue to work at something they love seem blessed.

Yes.

I realise that she's so obvious to me, so present in my art life, that I have failed to do any research on her.  So I wanted to focus for a while on these diagonal paintings, and have turned to the catalogue from that 2003 exhibition.  This has been a revelation as to the complexity of her thinking (knowing that she composed the paintings from painted lozenge shapes has affected my interpretation of them, as a relationship between surface shapes and colours).  

Up until the mid-80s BR had been working with stripes, straight and curving.  Through the early 80s she had been in a transitional phase, moving from works that built up a tension between sensations that released a perceptual experience, to ones that 'take sensation as the guiding line and build, with the relationships it demands, a plastic fabric which has no other raison d'etre except to accommodate the sensations it elicits' (BR).  So, a movement from the painting as a stimulant to a self-contained world.  Her stripey paintings grew more and more complex and she realised she needed to return to first principles. 

These were:
1.  composition - the architecture of the painting, the relation of form and colour
2.  the relation between the painting and nature - addressing the direct visual sensations of being in nature that precede interpretation and evaluation, that are immediate and fresh; complex relationships between space, line, tone and colour which 'provide a vehicle for those things which cannot be objectively identified but which nevertheless can be expressed in this way.' (BR) So immediate and suggestive.
Sensation central to both of these.

In 1986, as a way of exploring the internal relationships of a painting, she began to disrupt the vertical stripes with truncated diagonals (in 'Broken Gaze').

 This offset and opposed the verticality. But the effect is limited by the diagonals being contained within the stripes.  Her next move was to let them overrun, creating a lattice effect that opens up depth, a dynamic depth in which shapes advance and recede.  (This is what I hadn't noticed before because of my knowledge about the paintings' composition.)  There is a tension between complexity (which could fall into chaos) and control.  There is a new relationship between painting and viewer who now is drawn into the painting, maybe reading it sequentially, or moving from one area of colour and shape to another, or in and out of its depth. The early paintings pulsed, these unfold in time - they are a visual journey.

Ease, 1987

These paintings developed over the next 11 years, becoming more and more complex to the point where they risked fracturing.  The viewer was faced with something increasingly multifocal with the eye needing to be correspondingly more restless. 

High Sky 2, 1992

In some of the late ones harmony is restored by using larger visual units.  Nevertheless it was time to move on - into the current work which uses large curvy shapes.

But overall in this phase BR created paintings that realised 'a kind of place' (BR), 'a virtual arena defined entirely in terms of the spatial properties of form and colour' - but ones that could suggest to the viewer another place, one in the natural world.

I feel somewhat humbled that I borrowed the simple lozenge shape from these works for my cut hangings, thinking of it initially as an isolated unit - one that I could easily cut.  At the same time, I have had to consider composition: the shapes have to be placed down somehow.  The grid was an obvious choice for its simplicity; I wanted the minimum distraction from the light phenomena I was setting up and inviting. 

Thinking about BR's aim of creating 'a kind of place' helps me understand a little more clearly my own work.  Because it is an interaction between a material and natural light, it points more readily to the natural world both physically and imaginatively.  The first, originally called 'Align' - a visual description - I'm now re-titling 'Longing to touch', because when I look at those triangles coming into alignment, that evokes an emotional response in me.  'Scatter', now 'Just this one high sky' for me can't help but evoke sky through its colour and the movement of clouds through the upward drift of the shapes, even though there was no intention in this. The last piece I've made 'By the grace of a low branch' was directly influenced by seeing sunlight on leaves - and my own need to offset line with curve.  So the phenomenon of perception - the interaction between light and eye - is at their root but they are definitely not a self-contained space.  The light passes through them, they are just an object in its path.