We named one of our ring boxes after Bridget Riley, an inspirational British painter who was part of the 1960s Op Art movement (the term coined in 1964 by Time magazine), a form of visual art that used optical illusions. Our 'Riley' box is hexagonal in shape and also has a concentric hexagonal pattern on both the internal and external faces. We think that the geometric pattern created by the layers in the birch plywood is very striking and the natural wood contrasts perfectly with the vibrant colours we have chosen, just like in Bridget Riley's paintings.
Bridget Riley was born in 1931 and studied at Goldsmiths' College from 1949 to 1952, and at the Royal College of Art from 1952 to 1955. Whilst a student she was originally inspired by the post-impressionist pointillist technique pioneered by Georges Seurat and copied his paintings to reproduce his technique. This evolved into her experimenting with black and white geometric forms, as can be seen in her painting Current (1964), which appeared on the cover of The Responsive Eye catalogue. After a trip to Egypt her work started to explore colour, contrast, lines, parallelograms, and tessellating patterns.
We recently saw some of Bridget Riley's artwork in the Kunstmuseum, an amazing Art Deco gallery on the outskirts of The Hague, Netherlands. It was interesting to read about Riley's fascination for the work of Dutch artist Piet Mondrian and it was in the permanent exhibition Mondrian & De Stijl that we saw some of her more recent work from the exhibition, The Curve Paintings 1964 - 2014, highlighting her link to Mondrian. Like Mondrian and Riley we are also inspired by art and design that explores these same ideas and have a small collection of contemporary Cornish art that celebrates colour, line, shape, and abstraction.
The images selected show Bridget Riley's early and later paintings, as well as some Mondrian and Riley photos we took at the Kunstmuseum. The gallery was a train and a bus ride from Amsterdam. On the day we went it was blowing a gale and pouring with rain, but on entrance we decided that it was definitely worth all the trouble getting there for the magnificent building alone. We enjoyed the few hours we spent wandering around more than all the other art museums we visited during our week in the Netherlands. There were so many interesting collections to see, as well as the main M.C. Escher event which was absolutely wonderful. The cafe was great too with plenty of space and seating, unlike the Rijksmuseum. More in the future on the inspiring work we saw on this cultural visit.
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