Line

Rachel Federman: The path to Riley’s abstract paintings begins with the exploration of basic pictorial elements. In this 2019 interview, she describes her use of line, the most fundamental element of drawing:

Bridget Riley: Pictorial elements are the agents to which you can put these things through their paces. You need something to do something with . You can't, you can't explore, uh, without an agent. My line, I think, actually, uh, is my agent or was for a very, very long time. It can be a drawn line, as it was. With drawn lines, I've worked on making Movement in Squares and drawn lines through some of those big paintings- many of the big paintings. The curve is a curved line. It's, ... it's a line which has been, uh, bent in what I think is rather like the twists of a body. It takes different angles, different positions.