![Untitled Fragment [2/10], 1965 Bridget Riley](https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/secure.notion-static.com/779853e0-f767-4c4e-87b3-384132a8f77c/Untitled.png)
Untitled Fragment [2/10], 1965 Bridget Riley
The title ‘Fragments’ is significant in that most of the prints consist of images which the artist arrived at through making studies for paintings. (She was at this period working almost exclusively in black and white). In selecting perspex as the ground Riley was clearly interested in setting a dense black image upon an intensely white and brilliant surface.
P07105 seems to relate to a group of paintings in which Riley was considering the tensions found in the tight and loose undulations of lines. The fragment is closest to ‘Fall’ 1963, but it also approximates to ‘Polarity’ 1964, ‘Crest’ 1964 and ‘Current’ 1964. In ‘Drawing Towards Painting—2’ (Arts Council touring exhibition 1967–8) Riley exhibited a study which was a preparatory work for both ‘Descending’1965–6, and for P07106. She wrote in the catalogue that in this study she was ‘keeping each alternative vertical straight—the others more in a series of related curves’.
Fête, 1989 Bridget Riley
Fête is a screenprint featuring a highly colourful, abstract composition within a white border. The composition comprises twenty vertical bands each separated into numerous coloured sections. These sections vary in length and form parallelograms of different sizes. While the longer coloured parallelograms primarily look vertical in orientation, the smallest ones appear to cut diagonally across the upright bands. Where these latter shapes run into each other across adjacent columns and are identical in colour they also appear to form longer diagonal strips running in front of the vertical columns. The work features a wide range of even, unmodulated colours, with no discernible pattern to their organisation. The print is signed and dated in its bottom-right corner and at the bottom-left are written the title and the numbers ‘21 / 60’, which indicate that this print is number twenty-one in an edition of sixty.
This work was made by the British artist Bridget Riley in 1989, while she was living and working in London. Riley initially designed its composition in the form of a gouache painting on paper entitled February 15 ’89 1989, which is slightly larger in size than the final screenprint. At this time she commonly used gouache to plot out her compositions and it seems that the painting was a preparatory study, with the screenprint being the finished work. Fête was printed by Sally Grimson at Artizan Editions in Hove, England, both of whom she has worked with regularly since 1981. It was printed on thick, textured white paper, and as well as the edition of sixty, a set of ten artist’s proofs was produced.
The design of Fête relates to a large, untitled group of paintings on canvas, the precise number of which is not known, that Riley produced between 1986 and 1997 and which all feature vertical bands combined with diagonally oriented areas of unmodulated colour (see, for instance, High Sky 1992, Neues Museum Nürnberg, Nürnberg). She has also made two other screenprints relating to this group – Early Light 1987 and To Midsummer 1989. However, these prints are all considerably smaller than the paintings, which consistently measure over a metre in width.
The French word ‘fête’ translates into English as ‘celebration’ and could also refer to the traditional outdoor events of the same name often held in British villages. Riley may have chosen this title to emphasise the joyful quality of the work’s strong, bright colours or the energetic appearance of its dynamic composition. In 1996 she explained that she only ever selects titles after beginning to make her works and then tries to name them ‘according to their spirit’, often drawing on ‘memories of sensations in the past which have some sort of correspondence with those in the painting’. (Bridget Riley and Alex Farquharson, ‘Something To Look At: Bridget Riley in Conversation with Alex Farquharson’, in Bridget Riley: Recent Paintings and Gouaches, exhibition catalogue, Waddington Galleries, London 1996, p.11.)
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Alternating rows of rectangles, different heights
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Ending with the background colour
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Ending with circles
var rowCount = 0;
var rowHeights = [];
const scale = 50; // grid in px
const topMargin = scale * 4;
const colourEven = "#E6E8E7";
const colourOdd = "#0F1417";
function setup() {
createCanvas(1000, 1000);
background("#E6E8E7");
noFill();
noStroke();
noLoop();
rowCount = floor((random()*2) + 6);
for (var row = 0; row < rowCount; row++){
rowHeights[row] = scale/2 * (floor(random() * 5) + 1); // range of rect height
}
console.log(rowHeights);
}
function draw() {
for (var row = 0; row < rowCount; row++){
var y = topMargin;
for (var i = 0; i < row; i++){
y += rowHeights[i];
}
console.log('y value for row', row, y);
const rowHeight = rowHeights[row];
var start = 0;
var end = 0;
if (row % 2 == 0) {
start = scale * (floor(random() * 3) + 3); // range of where to start on x
end = scale * (floor(random() * 3) + 12); // range of where to end on x
} else {
start = scale * (floor(random() * 3) + 12);
end = scale * (floor(random() * 3) + 3);
}
drawCircles(start, end, y, rowHeight);
}
}
function drawCircles(start, end, y, diameter){
if (start < end){
for (x = start; x <= end; x += (scale/2)){
if (x % scale == 0) {
fill(colourEven);
} else {
fill(colourOdd);
}
const width = x >= end ? diameter : (diameter + scale/2); // end with circle
rect(x, y, width, diameter, diameter);
}
} else {
for (x = start; x >= end; x -= (scale/2)){
if (x % scale == 0) {
fill(colourEven);
} else {
fill(colourOdd);
}
const width = x <= end ? diameter : (diameter + scale/2);
const updatedX = x <= end ? (x + scale/2) : x;
rect(updatedX, y, width, diameter, diameter);
}
}
}