Bridget Riley's psychedelic shack

Feb 19 2010 By Lorne Jackson

Bridget Riley tells Lorne Jackson about her art, pop culture, psychedelia and shaping the future.

On being introduced to the painter Bridget Riley, I admit to suffering a slight sense of disappointment. Not because of any intellectual shortcomings from the artist. Her bird-blink eyes drilled into me with curiosity and good humour.

She’s generous with her time and opinions, too. Flashback, a retrospective of her work – which opened at Birmingham’s Waterhall Gallery at the start of the month – was being set up when we met. Yet Riley was willing to take a break from the hustle and bustle to give me a tour of her work.

Then came the disappointment.

She didn’t let me use a dictaphone to record our conversation.

Instead, I was forced to rely on those ancient tools of the journalistic trade, notepad and Biro.

Cause for regret, indeed.

Not merely because I was forced to exercise my hand muscles. Bridget talks fast.

The undermining of my expectations arose from the fact that Bridget was wary of my little recording gizmo.

I’d assumed she would embrace the newfangled. After all, isn’t she the High Priestess of New Fanglement? The mother of our modcon world?

Bridget Louise Riley was one of the prime movers and shakers who turned Britain from sedate into psychedelic.

A world populated by squares was destroyed by Bridget’s rival army of squares ... on canvas.

In the early ‘60s she discovered her signature style – working with geometric patterns to create hypnotic effects.

Bridget’s first great work, Movement in Squares, from 1961, looks like a chess board that is being throttled.

It’s a painting of black and white squares that become crushed into narrow rectangles near the centre of the canvas. The images create an optical illusion of distance, making the viewer see a corridor leading deep into the picture. Gazing upon this famous image, I decided it was Bridget’s doorway into the ‘60s.

With this work, she beckoned the fusty world of fifties England to follow her into a new, more glamorous universe.

Was this how Bridget felt, when the UK’s pendulum of predictability became more of a swinger?

Her eyes twinkle in recollection. “The early sixties was a very exciting time,” she nods. “I felt like something was ‘becoming’. Beginning at last. Before then, there had been 15 years of austerity in Britain.

‘‘Too much rationing, and everything in short supply. But now we felt we could change the world ourselves, or at least make a beginning. “As Obama would say, ‘Yes we can!’ That was the feeling my friends and I had.”

Riley became one of the most prominent artists of that dazzling decade, spoken of in the same admiring tones as Andy Warhol, or Peter Blake (who studied with her at the Royal College of Art).

She was one of the leaders of the movement that came to be known as Op Art, because of its disorientating optical effect on the viewer.

It’s not difficult to understand how this fed into the evolving sixties aesthetic.

Riley’s first shapes are as black and white as the early Beatles, in their sober suits.