Creativity Quote by Bridget Riley

What sounds like a casual diagnosis is really an artist describing the modern eye as spiritually unmoored. Bridget Riley, whose Op Art paintings can make a flat canvas feel like it’s pitching and breathing, links a formal problem - “lack of a center” - to a cultural one: the collapse of shared metaphysical guarantees. She’s not nostalgically pleading for church pews. She’s naming what happens to perception when the old anchor points are gone.

In Christian visual culture, “center” isn’t just compositional; it’s moral and cosmological. The cross, the haloed figure, the vanishing point that organizes space: these are ways of saying the world has hierarchy and purpose. Modernity breaks that contract. After wars, secularization, and the rise of abstraction, the picture plane stops promising a stable viewpoint. Riley’s own work weaponizes that instability. It denies you a single resting place; your gaze has to keep moving, as if certainty itself has become kinetic.

The subtext is quietly political: when religion’s certainties fade, we don’t simply “lose faith,” we inherit new kinds of anxiety and freedom. A decentered image mirrors a decentered society, where authority is contested and meaning is negotiated rather than received. Riley is suggesting that formal innovations in art aren’t just stylistic revolts; they’re symptoms of a larger epistemic shift. The eye learns to live without a throne at the center of the world.