Bridget Riley: ‘I want my paintings to make people feel alive’

Bridget Riley, queen of abstract painting, is 94 and lives alone in a six-storey white stuccoed Victorian house with a yellow front door in west London. For more than half a century, she has got out of bed here, gone straight to the studio and worked “within the inner logic of an invented reality” to create the stripes, curves and discs in shimmering gradated colour that dazzle us into feeling that her paintings, and we ourselves, are in swaying, surging motion.

She always hoped that “once you step across the threshold, you can move about in these paintings, you can inhabit them and enjoy the spaces and places that are built there”. In a gallery facing the sea at Margate’s new Turner Contemporary exhibition of her monumental works, purple, brown, green and turquoise circles flicker like a constellation of stars as the eye scans “Dancing to the Music of Time” (2022). In old age, Riley still makes geometric abstraction popular, gripping and enveloping.

When I cross the threshold of that yellow door on a sunny autumn morning and follow Riley through an ample hallway to her dining room-studio, rhythmic, quivering canvases bounce from every wall and hit me like an electric charge. In workmanlike black trousers, jacket and trainers, Riley herself — pellucid blue eyes, tousled white hair, furrowed features at once delicate and strong — is a force of coiled energy, moving nimbly among the paintings.

Does she have a favourite? “The one I’m going to make next,” she shoots back. Her jaunty, cut-glass accent sounds as grand and old as the house, a measured blend of warmth and reserve. Her background is posh progressive — Cheltenham Ladies’ College, followed by Goldsmiths, London, in the same cohort as the fashion designer Mary Quant — and her manner is cheerful, confident, gracious.

She has chosen lunch at home, and on the table — Eero Saarinen’s 1957 white laminated circular “Tulip” design — there is an inviting array of dishes: fat purple figs, hefty portions of porcelain-smooth buffalo mozzarella, shiny rocket and a mound of other red-veined and copper-tinted leafy greens, plus a bottle of wine. That alone would be a luscious meal; a printed menu, however, reveals that it is the first of four courses sent by Riley’s favourite local restaurant: Clarke’s of Kensington Church Street. Sally Clarke, chef to the artists (Lucien Freud breakfasted at her restaurant daily), selected each course.

As we hover by the table, Riley glances at a work in progress: coloured strips of different widths taped to a sheet of paper. “It’s been haunting me as something I have to do,” she says. She is also, unnervingly, watching my response to the paintings, because “perception is the medium. The viewer completes the painting. And I do trust the viewer, their intelligence, that interest can be aroused.”

I try to let colour behave as it will respond in certain situations. It may go in a certain direction, or it may not

A lover of Proust, Riley believes that “the basis of communication is people’s memories. These paintings may be triggering something already experienced. I rely on that. I feel it can be familiar, like greeting an old friend wearing a new hat.”

Her face creases into a chuckle and we settle into sumptuous green leather armchairs pulled up to the table. The salad — creamy, sweet, crunchy, tangy, each texture and flavour holding its own — is a blast of Italy. We eat beneath “Pink Landscape”, a Tuscan scene abbreviated into pink and orange dots, pulsating heat and light. A homage to the pointillism of Georges Seurat, this was Riley’s first significant painting; she made studies for it in Siena in 1960, travelling with her partner and mentor Maurice de Sausmarez.

Opposite hangs her copy of Seurat’s 1887 “Bridge at Courbevoie”, painted in 1959. Studying Seurat’s systematic application of interacting colours was crucial to Riley’s exploration of visual perception. Seurat’s river scene, she says “is so beautifully felt. He never loses sight of that chilly morning, the freshness, you feel the quiet. I was nudging 30 and it brought a whole new understanding, through the mind and looking: the sensibility of that morning, that time, the seasons, the solitary nature of the people, all by themselves, but not lonely.”

In the 1950s, she went regularly to London’s National Gallery. “I remember a marvellous room full of Rembrandts,” she says, “his humanism, [his] feeling for people . . . There’s the same feeling for people in Seurat, in ‘Bathers at Asnières’, the spirit of the day, sitting on the bank, what’s going on, what’s not going on: a powerful humanist optimism. And the war was over!”

Postwar elation, social change and the democratising impulse shaped Riley as they did her similarly upbeat contemporary, David Hockney. Riley recalls the “great interest [during the 1960s] in perception, rooted in the immediate past of impressionism and post-impressionism” — also a hopeful epoch.

She wants her paintings “to make people feel alive” — and indeed, introducing me to some of them, she talks as if they are people, with moods and personalities.

“This one, ‘Silvered 2’, has a grey, Pissarro’s grey — that troublesome grey.”

It doesn’t seem troubled, I say; it sparkles. “Grey also has a brilliant side,” she agrees. “Yes, here we’re getting on very well! I try to let colour behave as it will respond in certain situations. It may go in a certain direction, or it may not. Sometimes it will say ‘No!’ Matisse said don’t get rid of your mistakes, they are warning signals. Trying to deal with them, you can resolve things.”

An aniseed and vanilla aroma wafts from the kitchen. Riley’s assistant brings tarragon chicken with roasted vegetables and a paper-thin circle of potato galette too brittle to cut; we crumble it between our fingers. Riley drenches the chicken in a silky burnished sauce, applauds the whole hearty ensemble, and requests a serrated knife. But the utensil she’s using right now is a pencil, propelling it from one side of the folded napkin — a stand-in for a canvas — to another, elucidating, “I move things from here, to there — and consequentially other things happen.”

Trusting the “eye at the end of my pencil” led to her 1961 breakthrough, “Movement in Squares”.

“I thought of it before I made it, something very basic, fundamental. Everyone knew what a square was, so you could do something familiar, take a few liberties. I thought, ‘Go back to the beginning.’ It started with drawing, a line, then a square.” Eventually, 12 rows of alternating black-and-white squares, height consistent as width diminishes, create the illusion of rolling waves and deep crevices.

What is it like, I ask, to spend a lifetime working and thinking within the rigorous confines of geometry? There must have been sacrifices. “I am very methodical,” Riley grins. “Something of great help to me”, she reflects, was Stravinsky’s Poetics of Music: “My freedom will be so much greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action,” she says, paraphrasing the composer’s words. “The more constraint one imposes, the more one frees oneself of the chains that shackle the spirit.”

One self-imposed constraint is not to paint the works herself. At art school she excelled at drawing, but “facility can be a terrible trap. So I put it aside.” She is a conceptualist, trying to be “objective about what happens” on the canvas, “pushing little boats out to see if they sank or swam or paddled well”. Assistants paint according to her diagrams, which Riley compares to “a musical score, a form of notation”. Nevertheless, “painting has a huge emotional range,” she insists, quoting Constable’s line that “painting is but another word for feeling”. She adds: “I enjoy looking at Constable very, very much.”

A sole example of Riley’s exquisite classical drawing is on the wall: a tender female head in red conté, gazing down. “Yes, that’s my mother, it’s like her, she’s looking at something.” During the war, while Riley’s soldier father was away — he was a prisoner in Japan, and his fate was unknown for some time — she lived with her mother and sister in Cornwall, Schooling was patchy and her mother encouraged habitual close-up exploration, of water, plants, rocks, as a way of keeping anxiety at bay: “the healing power of looking”. Riley maintains a studio in Cornwall.

I still feel very close to my mother, very close to all my family. They may not all be here but I feel very close to them

Could she say more about her parents? “No, I don’t think I can,” she answers. At this personal question, she becomes withdrawn. The main course is finished, the cheese about to arrive, and Riley is tired. “It’s a nuisance getting old, one can’t think properly.”

I close my notebook, and her assistant is packing up the cheese when Riley relents: “Oh, bring the pudding!” Waiting, she considers the glass door knob. “Sometimes in the angle of the sun it’s a prism and you get a spectrum in ordinary cut glass. It hits the ground, gets longer and longer, and you can see the beginning of a curve, a little rainbow happening upside down.”

But the afternoon light is waning. A corner desk lamp shines brighter, illuminating a sculpture of a single tulip, petals, leaves, stem, all painted white. I am glad I decided against bringing a bouquet: just such a tulip used to stand in Piet Mondrian’s hallway in Hampstead, warning friends never to bring the severe abstract artist any flowers. Riley’s tulip was a gift from curators with whom she worked on Tate’s 1997 exhibition Mondrian: Nature to Abstraction.

She feels “great affinity with Mondrian. He gives you hope, faith in the future of painting.”

Like Mondrian, Riley constructs from minimal elements a distinctive, cohesive language. She once suggested Mondrian — and also Proust — as examples of an artist guarding his singular “text, his most precious possession . . . source of his innermost happiness” — perhaps a clue, from a painter who reveals little about her personal life, to her own interior world and its relation to her work.

Served in tall glasses, crushed meringue in peaks studded with blackberries is reviving. After a few mouthfuls, we return to biography. “I still feel very close to my mother, very close to all my family. They may not all be here but I feel very close to them.” In Cornwall, “my mother saw to it that we were OK as a family. Though Father was not there, he was never far from her mind. By his absence he was present.”

After the war, the family reunited in Lincolnshire: “Huge skies, flat, corduroy fields lined with cabbages, it helped me understand Mondrian,” she says. When her father had an accident, she nursed him, subsequently had a breakdown, then joined advertising agency J Walter Thompson. “I went there because I thought I couldn’t do anything, I was in despair. Oh, let’s not dwell on that. I did my own work in the lunch hour. The art director saw what I was doing and said, ‘I want one of those!’ I was so thrilled someone wanted something.”

After another crisis following her split from de Sausmarez, success came quickly with the black-and-white paintings; the term “op art”, which she dislikes, was coined to describe their dynamism. MoMA acquired the undulating “Current” (1964), the catalogue cover for its exhibition The Responsive Eye in 1965. It made Riley famous, but driving from the airport to the museum, she saw Madison Avenue’s shop windows full of imitative “op art” fashions, and was convinced that “it will take at least 20 years before anyone looks at my paintings seriously again”.

She was wrong. The classic U-shape career of female artists, sexy when young, ignored in middle age, then venerated as wise old women or inspired witches, didn’t happen to her.

One reason is that her paintings defy time. “The way I work allows me to go ahead and go ahead again and look back over my shoulder. I have studies, cartoons, from some stage in the process, or I may come across something at a moment I am open to it. It’s because the abstract concept is timeless.”

I am independent, I don’t have a contract. Independence is a very important thing for an artist. My good dealers — they do exist — have tolerated this

At Turner Contemporary’s six-decade exhibition, “Current: Dark Colours 10”, a work made this year, alternating wavy and straight triangles, is as buoyant as her first colour abstraction, the pale yellow/red striped “Late Morning 1” (1967-68). Paintings in “my Egyptian palette”, turquoise, blue, yellow ochre, brick red, white chords, inspired by a visit to the Nile, “the light-mirror desert” and Luxor’s tombs, span “Winter Palace” (1981) to “Pharaoh” (2024). “The Egyptians used the same colours for 3,000 years, they united the appearance of an entire culture,” Riley explains.

The Musée d’Orsay’s concurrent Bridget Riley exhibition, Point de départ, opens with “Lilac Painting 1”, dated 2007/1983, and puts works such as her vertiginous “Cataract 2” in dialogue with Seurat’s “Cirque”. The New York Times once hailed Riley “the last living post-impressionist”.

Impervious to fashion, Riley similarly never courted celebrity. She has no gallery representation. “I am independent, I don’t have a contract. Independence is a very important thing for an artist. My good dealers — they do exist — have tolerated this.” She stretches her arms like a pair of scales: “I find it better balancing.” She mentions Max Hetzler, David Zwirner and Angela Flowers as among the gallerists with whom she has enjoyed working.

Independence extends to the choice of solitude. Although she has domestic help, Riley “couldn’t work” unless she lived alone. She never married or wanted children.

Yet she is hardly the tormented lone studio painter. For Riley, art is a social act — not as in today’s divisive art as identity politics, but its opposite: the utopian modernist ideal of collective experience. “People are born all the time, with sensibilities, tastes. They may or may not become makers but respondents, receivers, writers about art — it’s not just making,” she says.

Her project, analysing relationships between colour, form, composition, perception, is undoubtedly cerebral, astringent, but the paintings’ sensory impact frees us to look, think, dream. “The recognition is a shared thing. The quality of interest, and that people enjoy it, it works for them, that is the communication I really prize.”

We have scraped the meringue glasses clean, savouring the last gloop of spicy tart damson sauce. The wine remains unopened. As I rise to leave, Riley fixes me again with intent though friendly scrutiny. “I remember when we first met! You were sitting in the front row at Tate at a talk I gave on Matisse’s ‘Snail’ — nearly an abstract painting. The snail is moving! I was so pleased you were there. And all’s well with the Tate when ‘The Snail’ is on show.”

A life-long thirst for looking gives Riley unquenchable vitality — and intense visual memory. “The Greeks realised that sight is the prime sense,” she concludes. “Using one’s sight is using a wide range of what we’re endowed with. It’s elusive, rich, satisfying, awe-inspiring.”

Jackie Wullschläger is the FT’s chief visual arts critic

‘Bridget Riley: Point de Départ’, musee-orsay.fr, to January 25

‘Bridget Riley’, turnercontemporary.org, November 22 to May 4

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