Bridget Riley was born in London but her childhood was spent in Cornwall and Lincolnshire. Just after the War she started at Goldsmith’s College and graduated in 1952 and then from the Royal College of Art in 1955. A brief stint of painting figures in a semi-impressionistic manner changed to pointillism, mainly landscapes, around 1958. She is best known for her black and white work in the 1960s and her ‘Op-art’ illusionary paintings and printmaking and during this period she was critically acclaimed winning the AICA Critics Prize (1963), John Moore’s Liverpool Open Selection Prize and in 1964 she was awarded a Peter Stuyvesant Foundation Travel bursary to the USA. In 1968 she won an International Painting Prize at the Venice Biennale.
