Bridget Riley opens "The Pleasures of Sight" with the "basis of her visual life", images from Cornwall. Among them:
- "Looking directly into the sun over a foreshore of rocks exposed by the tide -- all reduced to a violent black and white contrast, interspersed, here and there, by the glitter of water."
- "Delving into the minute grey and yellow world of the lichens, which encrust rocks and stems of trees like the work of the finest gold- and silversmiths, setting off the sudden green of a patch of moss."
And more:
- "Seeing first the white of foam, the blues of sea and sky through the delicate tracery of a row of bare trees in winter and then seeing the same view uninterrupted. In one context a wide expanse of receding towards a distant horizon, in the ohter a vertical cloisonné of brilliant fragmented colour."
Astounding.
For 31 years I wonder why the world is so empty of words that move like this -- icastic visual knots that marry the intesity of shining sight with the many-partedness of what it means to think through an image ... or a sound. And now here they are. Riley's words.
Katalin, at dinner: "Take this. You'll like her."
Indeed.
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