`No painter, dead or alive, has ever made us more aware of our eyes than Bridget Riley", wrote critic Robert Melville in 1971. He wasn't exaggerating. As she put it herself: "I used to try to push all the elements until they hovered on the brink of sheer sensation . . . " That sensation could be uncomfortable. Your eyes never rest on one of her paintings: they are either driven endlessly around the composition or, in the case of her earlier work, deflected away from it entirely by the dizzying shimmer of her linear patterns.
As she makes clear in one of the pieces reprinted in The Eye's Mind, an invaluable collection of her writings and interviews, it's no accident that her apparently dispassionate, abstract images pack such a punch. They had their beginnings, she explains, in the intense frustration she was experiencing in her relationship with an older man at the time, the painter and scholar Maurice de Sausmarez. Her first black-and-white abstracts were addressed directly to him, to convey "a message so loud and clear you'll know exactly how I feel".
It is this earlier work that links her indelibly to the psychedelia of the 1960s, when, to her surprise and eventual dismay, she became a celebrity. Feted in America in 1965, she was devastated to find her pictorial ideas pillaged and used as backdrops in trendy clothes stores. She thought: "It will take at least 20 years before anyone looks at my paintings seriously again." But she needn't have worried. In fact, she became the first British artist and the first woman ever to win the International Prize for painting at the Venice Biennale in 1968.
Furthermore, unlike a great deal of what was called Op Art, her work has worn extremely well. While artistic fashions came and went, she remained true to the spirit of what she did in the 1960s, steadily developing and extending her artistic vocabulary. Perhaps because she has never lost touch with her audience, her reputation is stronger than ever: witness the popularity of her current retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery in London.
Throughout this busy career, she has been for the most part a quiet, industrious figure. Then, in 1996, she was invited to deliver the William Townsend Memorial Lecture at the Slade School of Art and found herself thrust into controversy. She chose the occasion to comment on the diminished role of painting in contemporary art, in a way implicitly critical of the kind of Neo-Conceptual work favoured by the collector Charles Saatchi. The art world, she said, had "been converted into a machine for the production of art and its promotion".
This process had disrupted the connection between art and work. She cited Proust's remark that a writer's task is one of translation - that is, it's not enough to have great visionary thoughts; you must learn how to translate them into material form, something that comes through a disciplined relationship with particular media. Now "the would-be artist goes searching for art instead of learning how to be a translator".
Her occasional writings and interviews suggest that her espousal of this view was linked to her steadily growing awareness that her own work, far from representing a radical break with the past, was linked to the central tradition of Western painting. Not the least of the pleasures of The Eye's Mind is her intense, detailed reading of the work of other artists in that tradition, including Matisse, Seurat, Mondrian, the great Venetians and, rather unexpectedly, the American sculptor and video artist Bruce Nauman. Riley measures her words as carefully as she measures her crisply designed canvases, and her writing is dense, closely argued and, always, passionately engaged.
Aidan Dunne is the Irish Times art critic
