Quotes by Bridget Riley

• 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.
• 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.
• Painting is, I think, inevitably an archaic activity and one that depends on spiritual values.
• 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.
• I work with nature, although in completely new terms.
• 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.
• For me nature is not landscape, but the dynamism of visual forces.
• In my earlier paintings, I wanted the space between the picture plane and the spectator to be active.
• Focusing isn't just an optical activity, it is also a mental one.
• As the artist picks his way along, rejecting and accepting as he goes, certain patterns of enquiry emerge.
• 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.
• 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.