"IN music, you listen, your ear is doing something, you become aware of more than you are actually listening to." Bridget Riley, the English artist whose strong patterns became emblematic of the 1960s, makes strong analogies between the composition of music and the making of visual art.

She explains how a musician can only create experiences" through "combining the real elements of music - its high and low notes". She says: "Music is a sensory experience ... organised almost mathematically." She sees this technical discipline as "very necessary": "It does not suppress the pleasure of music, but in fact brings that very pleasure into existence."

Riley, who is currently exhibiting at the Green on Red Gallery in Dublin, aims to "orchestrate" colour in the same way that classical musicians orchestrate music.

What is most jarring about the above analogy is not necessarily that it is between art and music, but rather the particular music about which Riley wishes to talk. In some ways, the choice of classical music contradicts Riley's position as an icon of 1960s Pop culture. Riley does not see herself as having been part of this culture, however.

She adds: "It is very easy for myths to propagate about a certain tine in history. Not everyone was part of the swinging 1960s."

Riley's paintings in the Green on Red Gallery are made up of later works, done in the late 1980s and early 1990s. She explains that these abstract colour works were based on a trip to Egypt: "I had a scruple, which now seems extremely inappropriate, that I couldn't take their colours because they had actually been made for something else, a different time." She explains how the Egyptians had painted using a palette of five colours - blue, yellow, green, red and orange. "These same five colours were set against the whiteness of the desert contrasting with the bright, Mediterranean sun. They painted everything with these five colours, she says: "pottery, buildings, ceramics."

This reminded me of the story of Riley's early black and white paintings. Done in the 1960s, they were made up of psychedelic patterns, now indelibly connected with that time in history. The patterns used in these paintings were reproduced everywhere - on dresses, couches, lampshades. In some ways Riley's society was paying the same kind of reverence to her paintings that the Egyptians paid to the five-colour palette. And yet Riley was enraged by this, feeling that the reproduction of her patterns on mass-produced objects and fashionable dresses had in some way "falsified her work". Somehow, she had lost the final word. The story of her work had been rewritten.

Riley sees any interpretation of her work as a sort of fraud. She claims that whatever meaning the paintings may have cannot he translated into words: "The visual language of my paintings is not a language that can be equated with words," she says. And yet it is inevitable that these paintings will be talked about. In fact, in a sense, she uses words to describe them in her titles. The titles themselves are very poetic. I ask her why she had labelled a painting made up of vertical stripes Little Blue Quiver, and she replies: "I just thought it sounded better than 93A." However, she adds: "I think the viewer will experience the paintings to some degree as I do."

This makes sense in terms of the emotional impact of the words she chooses as titles, such as Encounter, Kiss, Deny, Entice. These paintings do not exist in a world without words. Riley has resigned herself to this by employing these very poetic descriptions of her own paintings.

It was interesting to watch Riley having, her photograph taken for the opening of her exhibition last Thursday. She was quite determined to have it taken as she wanted. Eventually, standing at the bottom corner of the painting, she agreed that the button could be pressed. The photographer remarked: "You're just like a full stop in the corner of the painting." Riley was very happy with this analogy and in a sense, the need to punctuate her work has been an on-going theme in her career. Riley does not want her work discussed or reproduced - the titles are her attempt to have the final say.