The second of this month’s five summer pictures is Bridget Riley’s To a Summer’s Day 2. It can currently be seen in Tate Britain’s retrospective exhibition of Riley’s painting.
The artist is still best known for the geometrically patterned, buzzing, strobing (and, to some viewers, migraine-inducing) abstract canvases with which she first made her name in the early and mid-1960s. Executed in black and white and occasionally shades of grey, those works were widely copied by fabric and dress designers and quickly established Riley as a leading practitioner of what critics then dubbed “Op Art”. Like most art historical labels, that has proved more of a hindrance than a help to sympathetic understanding of the art which it supposedly describes, leading among other things to a prevalent misconception of Riley as a kind of optical trickster.
In fact she is an idiosyncratic, romantic and somewhat mystically inclined devotee of nature. Her pictures cannot be said to “represent” the natural world. Nor are they intended to, being entirely abstract designs of line, form and (since the late 1960s, when she abandoned her previously monochromatic palette) colour. But they are inspired by it. They are contrived as visual shocks or surprises, fields of patterned intensity which may jolt beholders into an enhanced awareness both of their own perceptions and of the wider world.
“The pleasures of sight have one characteristic in common – they take you by surprise,” wrote Riley in an illuminating essay itself entitled The Pleasures of Sight, which was published in 1984, four years after she had painted the picture reproduced on this page. “They are sudden, swift and unexpected. If one tries to prolong them, recapture them or bring them about wilfully their purity and freshness is lost. They are essentially enigmatic and elusive. One...
