Creativity Quote by Bridget Riley

Art doesn’t arrive as lightning; it advances like a hand feeling for a light switch in a dark room. Bridget Riley’s line is a quiet rebuttal to the myth of the artist-as-oracle. The phrase “picks his way along” demystifies making: it’s tactile, cautious, and full of small risks. You can hear the studio in it - the tests, the scraps, the near-misses - a practice defined less by grand vision than by disciplined navigation.

Riley’s real trick is where she places meaning: not in the “answer,” but in the act of “rejecting and accepting.” Those verbs expose the hidden economy of art-making. Every choice is also a refusal, and those refusals leave a trace. Over time, the trace becomes legible: “certain patterns of enquiry emerge.” That last verb matters. The patterns aren’t imposed; they surface from repetition, from attention, from the artist’s willingness to stay with a problem long enough for it to reveal its own structure.

The context is Riley’s broader project as an Op Art pioneer: systematic exploration that still depends on human judgment. Her paintings look engineered, but they’re built on sensitivity to perception - how the eye strains, steadies, gets tricked. The subtext is almost moral: clarity is earned, not declared. Inquiry isn’t a mood; it’s a method that shows up, day after day, until the work starts teaching the artist what question they’ve been asking all along.