Quotes About Bridget Riley

#1. Painting is a science pursued as an enquiry into the laws of nature ... Observation is considered the key to natural science.

Bridget Riley

#2. I look to historians for their power to illuminate not just the invisible lineaments of the present, but also that which is not present. What are the roads that were not taken that most shape our own time?

Rick Perlstein

#3. As the artist picks his way along, rejecting and accepting as he goes, certain patterns of enquiry emerge.

Bridget Riley

#4. Painting is, I think, inevitably an archaic activity and one that depends on spiritual values.

Bridget Riley

#5. In general, my paintings are multifocal. You can't call it unfocused space, but not being fixed to a single focus is very much of our time.

Bridget Riley

#6. The actual basis of colour is instability. Once you accept that in lieu of something which is stable, which is form, you are dealing with something which is unstable in its basic character, you begin to get a way of dealing with it.

Bridget Riley

#7. I work with nature, although in completely new terms.

Bridget Riley

#8. The word 'paradox' has always had a kind of magic for me, and I think my pictures have a paradoxical quality, a paradox of chaos and order in one.

Bridget Riley

#9. I never make studies from nature. They would get in the way. I make use of my mind.

Bridget Riley

#10. I learned from Seurat this important thing about colour and light, that 'a light' can be built from colour. I learned a great deal about interaction, that 'a blue' in different parts will play all sorts of different roles.

Bridget Riley

#11. For me nature is not landscape, but the dynamism of visual forces.

Bridget Riley

#12. You write from what you know but you write into what you don't know.

Grace Paley

#13. In my earlier paintings, I wanted the space between the picture plane and the spectator to be active.

Bridget Riley

#14. 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, other things may come into play.

Bridget Riley

#15. it is not dancing toy animals that are an endless source of delight for infants, but rather having control.

Barry Schwartz

#16. I used to build up to sensation, accumulating tension until it released a perceptual experience.

Bridget Riley

#17. If you can allow colour to breathe, to occupy its own space, to play its own game in its unstable way, it's wanton behaviour, so to speak. It is promiscuous like nothing.

Bridget Riley

#18. It seems the deeper, truer personality of the artist only emerges in the making of decisions ... in refusing and accepting, changing and revising.

Bridget Riley

#19. For any character, male or female, I think it's important to have ... it's cliche to say a flawed character, but to really think about the good and the bad and make sure that both are present, and it doesn't just become a glossed over icon of perfection.

Jane Jensen

#20. 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 in conflict.

Bridget Riley

#21. One of the hardest things about directing is just to be patient and remind yourself that you've been in Week 1 of a rehearsal process yourself, and you know what it feels like.

Laurie Metcalf

#22. I think this lack of a center has something to do with the loss of certainties that Christianity had to offer.

Bridget Riley

#23. I love to be alone, and I did as a child as well, especially if I was outside.

Aurora Aksnes

#24. 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 what that something else is.

Bridget Riley

#25. 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, the greater the freedom of the spirit behind.

Bridget Riley

#26. It is important that the painting can be inhabited, so that the mind's eye, or the eye's mind, can move about it credibly.

Bridget Riley

#27. 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 interpretation.

Bridget Riley

#28. Focusing isn't just an optical activity, it is also a mental one.

Bridget Riley

#29. A stump loomed in front of them, splitting the path. They drifted apart, their clasped hands rising as it came between them.

"Hold on, " Laura said. "Hold on.

Brock Cole