Bridget Riley exhibition

I recently visited the Bridget Riley exhibition at the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh. I didn't know much about her work in advance, but I'd loved a couple of her paintings on my first ever visit to the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow many years ago, so I knew I'd enjoy the exhibition.

Usually I spend a lot of time reading the captions with the pictures, but in this case I just allowed myself to absorb the patterns and colours instead, and to capture some of the patterns in my sketchbook. Working in a grid made it really easy to record the patterns, although some of them required a double space!

The first room showed how she'd been inspired by Seurat, and the second was full of bold black and white pictures that I loved, then a room of huge colourful paintings. One of the staff members was really excited to show me the next room after she spotted the sketches I was making. This room contained the graph paper studies for the paintings, and it was really fascinating. After this there were many more rooms, each full of either colourful or monochrome works.

The colours of the paintings were lovely. They just seemed to work so well together. And the huge canvases made them into perfect backgrounds for the occasional selfie!

After exploring further, the guide checked my sketchbook to make sure that I'd visited all the rooms! "Have you seen,... ah, yes, I can see it here!" I filled in all but one square, then I placed the exhibition sticker there. Despite this being such a colourful exhibition, I think it will work best to leave my drawing as monochrome.