ON A COLD AND SOGGY WINTER DAY we set out for London to visit the major retrospective of artist Bridget Riley. She is one of those painters that has to be seen in person. There is definitely a sense of being transformed by or through the colour relationships she explores in her paintings. The result is they create a deep and lasting positive feeling, like being beamed up into the purring lines and out the other side (in the process) a kind of re-materialisation happens. Bridget Riley experiments with an obvious love for nature and careful consideration of forms that enable repetiton and complexity of moving parts and associations — emitting and colliding across the canvas in lines, vortexes, spots, triangles, zips and tongues of colourful rhyme. The horizontal and vertical wave paintings (apart from being impossible to photograph) have an energetic field and absorb time with a universal hum; a bit like hearing a tree full of bees and smelling blossom for the first time. We were lucky to be left alone long enough for the marks on the canvas to somehow take over, there is nothing illusory about the experience either, it is very physical and months later still brings a sense of visual ecstasy. Art was definitely the reset our mind needed and the affect of spending time with Bridget Riley paintings has been lasting 

Painting IN PICTURES — Bridget Riley at the Hayward Gallery in London.

If you can allow colour to breathe, to occupy its own space, to play its own game in its unstable way, it’s wanton behaviour, so to speak. It is promiscuous like nothing.

Bridget Riley