Bridget Riley - ACE083.2

Stripes and colours. Bridget Riley preparing white surface. Three paintings. Riley at work. More paintings including some from the Blaze series (1960s). Riley’s VO: "I remember one very hot summer – it was in the south of France – … and the light was so strong, it dazzled... One lost all sense of focus. Everything seemed to disintegrate in light… It was like standing in a field of pure energy." Painting of a landscape in something resembling a Pointillist style. "What is the energy of light and how do we see it?" asks commentary over black and white paintings investigating this. "… How does a painting re-enact that experience?" Riley setting up paper. "Bridget Riley’s art is an exploration of the possibilities is vision… experiment to find out what the eye can see…"; painting. Riley in her studio, trying different colours on pieces of paper and recording what she’s done. Panels of colours in stripes and rough shapes. Commentary says the intention behind this process "… is to bring something incalculable, something unexpected into being". Riley mixing paints. Versions of the landscape. Commentary talks about such early work as "exploring the textures of space" and in which light "dissolves" the shapes of the subject into "a shimmer of colour", but says that the eye is "looking for an essential and elusive ‘something’ beyond the recording of shape and contrast and colour… which will generate its own movement solely in terms of painting, generate its own space and its own light". Film of water, flowers, hills, woods, etc. Some of Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings of water in which he analysed "the rhythm of natural forces and natural phenomena…" in "sylised patterns". Van Gogh drawings expressing the perception of those natural phenomena through a pattern of marks on paper which "generates… its own nervous energy". Copy, by Riley in 1959, of Le Pont de Courbevoie (1886-1887) by Seurat, whose ideas "became a guideline for her own". Looking at a book on Futurism: Giacomo Balla "experimenting with the optical sensation of movement"; and Umberto Boccioni "exploring the emotional consequences of kinaesthesia, the equivalence between sight and sensation…" Riley at work, tracing horizontal curves with a template; her VO saying that "rhythm and repetition are at the root of movement… by massing them and repeating them, they become more fully present"; example. She talks about the shapes needing to "breathe" to release their energy: paintings. "A rhythm that’s alive has to do with changing pace …": paintings. Illusion of movement on Breathe (1966); Riley walks past painting on display. Serif (1964); Fall (1963).