Bridget Riley presented with Sikkens prize for her work in colour

Artist famed for her abstract monochrome op art gives rare interview after scooping Dutch award

When Bridget Riley first started to make abstract paintings – beginning in 1961 with her chequerboard composition Movement in Squares – she banished colour from her art, using only black and white. It was six years later, in 1967, that she began introducing colour to her dazzling geometric compositions. This week, the painter, one of Britain's most revered living artists, has become the first Briton and the first woman to win the Sikkens prize, a Dutch award recognising the use of colour.

Previous winners include US artist Donald Judd, but also the Paris street-cleaning department, "for the consistent use of the colour green", and, in the 1970s, hippies, "for the exuberant use of colour as a playful aspect in human society".

In a rare interview, Riley, 81, spoke about the use of colour in her work, which was dubbed "op art", a pun on the pop art movement, in the 1960s. "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," she said, referring to Georges Seurat's Bridge at Courbevoie, in the Courtauld Institute. "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."

That was Movement in Squares. The abstract works, in fact, began to possess some of the qualities Riley had discerned in that Tuscan heat haze: "Movement, shimmering, sparkling and reflecting … all those things that happen in landscape."

The apparently stern, self-imposed restrictions, such as the initial lack of colour and the gradual introduction of elements such as the curve, had been huge aids to her, she said. "Too much freedom is terrifying. The first thing Stravinsky would do was to set himself limits in his work. If he still felt inhibited by freedom, he set himself more limits." In a 2009 essay for the London Review of Books, Riley quoted the composer's words: "The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one's self of the chains that shackle the spirit."

Asked about the difference between abstract and figurative art, she said: "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." Certain arrangements of paint suggest figures or objects, she said, through tacitly agreed conventions – but in the end, all painting is about relationships of colour, shape and line, whether abstract or figurative.

Abstraction and figuration, she said, share the capacity to offer a spiritual experience to the viewer. "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."

To mark the prize, an exhibition of Riley's art has opened at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, including a new 20-metre wall painting executed by assistants, as is usual in her work. "I hope people will find things in it to look at," she said. "It has a variety of relationships, a variety of passages in it. There are things to find in it, I hope, just as there are in a landscape painting."

Riley has long had a serious relationship with the Old Masters: one of her important student works was a copy of Jan van Eyck's Portrait of a Man, a possible self-portrait in which the sitter is dressed in a red turban, and, in 2010, the National Gallery held an exhibition setting her work alongside paintings by artists including Raphael and Mantegna.

Asked about her impressions of the contemporary art scene of today – larger by far and more widely recognised by the public than when Riley began her career in the 1960s – she chose to talk about the Renaissance. "Contemporary art is not a new thing," she said. "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."