ben's interweb

Bridget Riley

I am just finishing watching a fascinating BBC documentary about Bridget Riley … ..

I think you would have enjoyed this, Ben: the use of geometrical shapes and very simple ‘abstract’ forms to make paintings that move, shimmer, change, confuse, change colour … but are also really emotional, which also capture your gut, those orange and yellow chakras … and also do, as the commentator (Kirsty Wark) says, come off the wall, become 3D … *(footnote)

It turns out she has strong connections with Cornwall – the film had lots of footage that looked like the coast near Newquay (Crantock?) - but that her main practice: geometrical forms, repetitive forms, are based on an appreciation and inspiration from artists going back in time. She started, apparently, with Seurat, and that pointillism thing of creating surfaces out of multicoloured dots or dabs of paint … but she references historic artists (e.g Constable, in her entrance to the National Gallery – Messengers: large coloured dots on a white ground) and has much more depth than suggested by the black and white patterns on 60’s miniskirts!

And then, to me (she is now in her 90’s) she sounded, and almost looked, like Auntie Mary, from that generation who grew up around the second war … I can’t quite put my finger on the feeling it portrays – perhaps ‘wisdom’ is the word …

… Bridget Riley certainly is still very influential – and it was strange to see her at 90: she seems to me to be always as she was in the 60’s: young, with a bob, and a bit angry with the world







*Footnote: there was a brief reference to her making her painting 3D: an installation that people went into, but she implies that it was too much: they come off the walls anyway, so you don’t need to curve the walls all round the viewer ...

How do you get your mind around a whole tree?

Hi Andrew,Could you please add this to Ben's Interweb. Many thanks for the Bridget Riley. Joza x

I first heard the name Bridget Riley many years ago when i was a second year student at the Jamaica school of art.

The English artist Harry Thubron and his wife Elma, both formidable art teachers had been sought by the art school and had arrived from England to begin their work among us lot.

We were told that Harry had at one time taught Bridget Riley, in those days living in Jamaica in more or less isolation from the international art world meant that not many of us knew who Bridget Riley was, and for a long time having only book reproductions to go by I thought that she was a good artist but not a spectacular one. It was only years later when living in London that I went to an exhibition of hers at the south bank and spent hours returning again and again to particular paintings not wanting to leave the gallery, that I experienced the wonder of Bridget Riley.

Back then in Jamaica as a student i was experiencing the wonder of the teaching of Harry Thubron. My first introduction to him was when i arrived late to a meeting of the whole school at which he first met the students, the art school was in an old large wooden building, the rooms where large but there was no more room in the main downstairs hall where Harry had already begun his introduction.

So I stood outside an open window looking in, Harry was talking about art and what the aim of an artist might be - what would be a suitable challenge for an artist - what huge problem might an artist try to solve - an artist has to expand thinking.

Among the first words i heard him say were

"How do you get your mind around a whole tree"

and I thought Yes this is someone I want to keep listening to.

The excitement and possibility of that sentence "How do you get your mind around a whole tree" is something that I think Ben would love.