Jackie Wullschlager interviews painter Bridget Riley on the occasion of the exhibition Bridget Riley The Stripe Paintings 1961-2014 at David Zwirner, London, on view from June 13 – July 25, 2014.

Riley comments: “Increasingly I work at a technical distance. For me the work is not physical. It has to be made, of course. Facility is important but it can also be a terrible trap. Many painters who had great facility did nothing else. So I put it aside. I give my hands to someone else. It drove me into digging into myself to find out what it was that I should do, getting a dialogue going between me and what I was doing. Mondrian put it incredibly beautifully: ‘This is how I found this way of working.’ ”

Wullschlager's article also includes an excerpt from Bridget Riley’s collected writings titled The Eye’s Mind (Thames & Hudson).