Riley Sonnet

Bridget’s *Riley Sonnet* is a refined meditation on optical perception, advancing the legacy of Op Art through a contemporary, poetic lens. Built through disciplined geometry and calibrated chromatic shifts, the composition uses rhythmic linework and precise tonal gradations to generate vibration, depth, and a sense of movement that seems to pulse across the picture plane.

The artist’s exacting technique—where repetition becomes variation—invites sustained looking, rewarding the eye with subtle spatial reversals and shifting afterimages. Positioned within the cultural lineage of postwar abstraction and British visual innovation, *Riley Sonnet* speaks to today’s screen-based attention economy, translating visual flux into a rigorously crafted, gallery-scale experience of embodied seeing.

Bridget Louise Riley CH CBE (born 24 April 1931) is an English painter known for her singular op art paintings. She lives and works in London, Cornwall and the Vaucluse in France.

Riley was born at Norwood, London, the daughter of a businessman. Her childhood was spent in Cornwall and Lincolnshire. She studied at Goldsmiths’ College from 1949 to 1952, and at the Royal College of Art from 1952 to 1955. She began painting figure subjects in a semi- impressionist manner, then changed to pointillism around 1958, mainly producing landscapes . In 1960 she evolved a style in which she explored the d…