Bridget Riley Quotes

A picture should be looked at - not talked about.

It is important that the painting can be inhabited, so that the mind's eye, or the eye's mind, can move about it credibly.

I think this is true for all artists. My senses are very important to me.

Color is an intense experience on its own.

Colors answer feeling in man; shapes answer thought; and motion answers will.

I try to figure out - intellectually, philosophically, psychologically - what the experience of beauty is.

There are so many reactions to art that make sense to me - but 'ick' means something.

You don't have to know anything about art to appreciate it or to look at it. There aren't any hidden secrets or things that you're supposed to understand.

Any piece of art has the potential to emotionally touch you and nudge you.

The fact that people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions.. the people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when painting them. And if you say you are moved only by their color relationships then you miss the point.

Art first of all is optical. That's where the material of our art is: in what our eyes think.

Art is for stimulation, excitement, adventure.

Sometimes good art jumps out at me; most of the time I see bad art, or see nothing at all and just drift, feeling weird, pretending to be fine.

Painting does not come from intelligence so much, as from sight and feeling and invention.

The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations.

What art makes us see, and therefore gives to us in the form of 'seeing', 'perceiving' and 'feeling' (which is not the form of knowing,) is the ideology from which it is born, in which it bathes, from which it detaches itself as art, and which it alludes.

One of the surest evidences of an elevated taste is the power of enjoying works of impassioned terrorism, in poetry, and painting. The man who can look at impassioned subjects of terror with a feeling of exultation may be certain he has an elevated taste.

Look out! Be on your guard, because alone of all the arts, music moves all around you.

One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind. To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it.

My forms are not abstractions of things in the real world. They're also not symbols. I would say that my job is to invent these forms and to put them together in a way that keeps your interest, to give the forms a quirky identity so you can engage with them, so you realize there's an inner intelligence or logic. If you stop asking what they mean, or what they remind you of, and just look at them for 29 seconds, you find that they want to explain themselves and show you how much every tiniest detail is related to the whole.

If I could prescribe a single rule for looking at a work of art it would be to enjoy it. If we're honest with ourselves, we have to admit we enjoy our tears just as much as we enjoy our laughter. The only moments of life that are a bore are when we don't care one way or another.

When I've heard a piece of music or seen a painting that moves me, it gives me something.

I'll go and see anything so long as it amuses me, or moves me. If it doesn't do either I want to go home.

A picture lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive observer

Shut your eyes, wait, think of nothing. Now, open them ... one sees nothing but a great coloured undulation. What then? An irradiation and glory of colour. This is what a picture should give us ... an abyss in which the eye is lost, a secret germination, a coloured state of grace ... loose conciousness. Descend with the painter into the dim tangled roots of things, and rise again from them in colours, be steeped in the light of them.