Bridget Riley - ACE083.3

Water running over furrows, swirling clouds, wind over wheatfield, moving leaves, agitated bubbles, the sort of movements which commentary says "the eye can only sense … in their passing". Paintings. Flock of starlings in flight. Paintings. Commentary says that "there is movement described and movement present but the eye is … too dazzled to see… but … feels movement…" Paintings including Descending (1965) and one from the Blaze series. Commentary asks "what is the shape of colour… what is its movement…?" Painting; test for one of the components; more paintings. Jars of colour. Riley at work, trying out colour combinations: her VO points out that "colour as light and colour as paint behave in quite different ways" and that Monet and Seurat and others showed how "to make paint behave as light does…" Paintings. "Colour does not have direction" says commentary and talks about the effects of its "energy" and its "presence in space". Commentary asks about "the kind of space" needed and how it is organised. Various colour tests, etc. Tree branches swaying. Riley’s VO says "… colour hovers somewhere halfway between the depths of distance and your eyes which see it, an illusory space…" Horizontal grey black white with thin colours inside the whites. Riley being helped to bring up a large painting over her front porch. Her VO continues, "The painting is an invented space…independent of nature, but relying on the same methods of perception by which one experiences nature…" and goes on to talk about binocular vision and different focuses. Paintings. "Colours are absolutely interdependent", she says over panels of stripes in toning colours, and have to be thought of "in groups, in clusters, in relationships". VO ("… can throw something off the canvas between you and the painted surface…") continues over her manipulating pieces of coloured paper; paintings. "What is literally on the canvas is not all you see: it’s only the springboard which makes you see more...".