Bridget Riley: Learning from Seurat

Interesting exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery of works by Bridget Riley which were inspired by a copy she made of a Seurat picture from their collection in 1959.

She had painted the picture to understand his technique and called the exercise “looking, learning, internalizing and applying”. It proved to be one of the breakthrough points in her move to abstract work. Her copy is larger than the original with bigger dots of paint. I loved a 1960 pink landscape which was included here which showed Riley using a Seurat technique for an original work 

From there she went on to do black and white abstracts and there is one in this small show which then led on to the coloured line pictures we know now and again there were a couple of examples here. I love these line pictures and find them really clever but I just can’t look at them as they disturb my eyes, which I guess in the aim.

This show was so interesting as it highlighted the techniques of two artists and made you think about the role of colour and how colours work together and can be used to create an image.

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