There's something quite ironic in Bridget Riley — an artist who made a name for herself with black-and-white abstractions — picking up the Sikkens Prize for color in her work. But then again, Britain's grande dame of abstract art has a career full of experimentation behind her, and what she's best known for only represents a tiny part of her long career. Just six years after her landmark composition "Movement in Squares" (1961), Riley started to introduce vibrant hues to her canvasses. These have become one of her trademarks, almost as signature as the vibrating Op Art patterns with which she's been closely associated.

The Sikkens Prize isn't a conventional venture either. It is awarded every other year by Rotterdam's Sikkens Foundation, a philanthropic body whose objective is to "promote social, cultural and scientific developments in society in which colour plays a specific role." Past laureates include Donald Judd and Le Corbusier, as well as the hippie community, and Paris's street cleaning department "for the consistent use of the colour green," reports the Guardian's Charlotte Higgins.

Riley is the first woman in the Sikkens Prize's half-century-long history to receive the award. It was presented to the artist during a ceremony at the Gemeentemuseum in the Hague, which also marked the opening of a large exhibition of Riley's work in the museum, including a 20-by-4-meter mural drawing. At this occasion, the notoriously media-shy artist, now 81, gave a rare and lengthy interview to the Guardian. ARTINFO UK has broken out some of the great artist's key reflections from the piece (for the full interview, read Higgins' article):

On Her Early Days: 

"In my years after leaving art school, I found a way of learning about the use of use of colour in modern art by copying a Seurat. It was the landscape of a river and its banks in autumn. I copied it from a reproduction, because it is much easier to copy when one is not intimidated by the presence of a masterwork. I learned lessons about how colours behave through interaction when placed next to each other.

"And then, on a very spectacular summer day looking over a valley near Siena, sparkling and shimmering in the heat, I made my own attempt. I made studies, and later, a painting. I was quite pleased, in fact, with what I'd been able to do, but it had nothing to do with what I had actually experienced in front of this landscape. So I decided to start again to find a new beginning — to start from the themes themselves, that is to say, shapes, lines, and so on. That led to my making a black-and-white painting and seeing what it would do: and it moved."

On Abstraction Versus Figuration:

"Many people would like to know how to look at abstract painting because they may be used to looking at figurative painting. But I personally believe they are all about painting itself. The big difference is conventions of looking.

"One of the most extraordinary things to look at is a painting of heaven and the celestial hosts and the mother of God — these are themes that artists gave as an experience of spiritual matters to their audience. In its best form [abstract] painting offers a spiritual experience. It's very hard to define what that might precisely mean, and one shouldn't try."

On Contemporary Art:

"Every period has its contemporary wing. In the Renaissance the practice of painting would have been a much bigger thing. Many people would have been painting, for religious works, for festivals, for processions; painting churches, carriages, chests, boats. There would have been an extraordinary amount of brushwork and decoration. These things furnished a platform for high art, as it were, but no one set out to be a fine artist. Some individuals simply raised their bar, or got more ambitious. There will always be people born with talent, with gifts, with minds that seek new experiences, generation after generation."

"Sikkens Prize 2012: Bridget Riley," October 29, 2012 – January 6, 2013, Gemeentemseum, The Hague, The Netherlands