Creativity Quote by Bridget Riley

Riley snaps “focus” out of the camera lens and plants it in the skull, which is exactly the provocation her work has been staging since the 1960s. As an Op artist, she’s famous for patterns that appear to ripple, vibrate, or buckle in place. Nothing is actually moving, yet your eyes swear it is. That gap between the inert canvas and the restless viewer is her true subject, and the line reads like a quiet manifesto: perception is an event you perform, not a neutral recording.

The intent is double-edged. On the surface, she’s demystifying a visual phenomenon: optical effects aren’t tricks “in” the image so much as interactions between image and nervous system. Underneath, she’s pushing back against the idea that seeing is passive or purely physiological. “Mental” signals responsibility and agency. If your attention is scattered, the world doesn’t just blur; it reorganizes. Riley’s paintings force you to notice your own looking - to feel how quickly the mind reaches for stability, how easily it tips into illusion, how appetite for pattern can override fact.

Context matters: Op art was often treated as stylish, even decorative, a kind of Swinging Sixties eye-candy. Riley’s phrasing insists on rigor. She’s arguing that the real drama isn’t sensation but cognition: the mind’s labor of selecting, sustaining, and interpreting. In an attention economy that profits from distraction, her statement lands as both aesthetic principle and cultural critique.