Bridget Riley: ‘I want my paintings to make people feel alive …’

November 7, 2025

Lunch with the FT … Life & Arts
Jackie Wullschlager – Published NOV 7 2025

‘Bridget Riley, queen of abstract painting, is 94 and lives alone in a six-storey white stuccoed Victorian house with a yellow front door in west London. For more than half a century, she has got out of bed here, gone straight to the studio and worked ‘within the inner logic of an invented reality’ to create the stripes, curves, and discs in shimmering gradated colour that dazzle us into feeling that her paintings, and we ourselves, are in swaying, surging motion …’ [subscribers to the FT can read more of the article, here … ]

… serving a Clarke’s feast at home, however, deserves a mention …

‘… She has chosen lunch at home, and on the table — Eero Saarinen’s 1957 white laminated circular “Tulip” design — there is an inviting array of dishes: fat purple figs, hefty portions of porcelain-smooth buffalo mozzarella, shiny rocket and a mound of other red-veined and copper-tinted leafy greens, plus a bottle of wine. That alone would be a luscious meal; a printed menu, however, reveals that it is the first of four courses sent by Riley’s favourite local restaurant: Clarke’s of Kensington Church Street. Sally Clarke, chef to the artists (Lucian Freud breakfasted at her restaurant daily), selected each course.’