‘Walking over the cliffs on a windy day – the rough grass snaking before one as though so many silver pennants were fastened to the earth.’ So Riley wrote of her childhood in Cornwall, describing an early memory of the landscape there as one of the sources of the ‘Pleasure of Sight’ (the title of the essay from which this quotation comes) which would lead her to becoming an artist. She made her name in the 1960s with her intense, vibrant, rhythmic, at times even hallucinatory, black and white paintings. Her subsequent development into coloured abstracts may be more easily linked to these early roots in landscape. Here, in this recent print, the familiar tensions and contrasts which characterise all her works play out once again in monochrome. The basic unit is a triangle morphed with two circular segments into a kind of arrowhead, arranged in groups of twos, threes or fours; some overlap, others appear distinct. But these diagonal clusters of feathered or winged blacks can also be read in reverse. Look at the white and you see inverse triangular shapes heading off in the opposite direction, partially forming larger white triangles with an emphatic horizontal top edge. Neither reading dominates but both co-exist, creating a balance of sorts but one that is dynamic, even febrile and certainly never quite settled. The title, by the way, would have been given at the end of the creative process. Similar tensions and counterpoints are the essence of the literary sonnet in which infinite variations are made possible by departures from the structured discipline of the form itself.
