Bridget Riley

Perceptual art is concerned with the effects and processes of what, in this film, Bridget Riley calls `the great privilege of sight.' `Looking,' as she puts it, `is a pleasure - a continual pleasure.' From the black and white paintings of the early 1960s which first established her international reputation, to her increasing concern with the self-generating luminosity of pure color, the film traces her `exploration of the truth of what one can see.' In the studio, we see her working on a painting - finding that visual structure which from basic and simple elements will release complex effects of energy, movement, space, light and `induced' color through the physical act of looking. Certain artists - Van Gogh, Seurat, Monet and the Futurists - are particularly important to her. But the film also shows the inspiration she has always drawn from certain types of visual experiences in nature. `Painting,' as Bridget Riley says, `has to obey the laws of painting.' But for her that is a process parallel to nature, dependent on our day-to-day experience of the joy of using our eyes.

© 1998-2008 The Roland Collection & Pira Intl.