Creativity Quote by Bridget Riley

Op art is often misread as a visual prank: a retinal magic trick, a museum-friendly dizziness. Bridget Riley’s line quietly insists on something more deliberate and, frankly, more controlled. “Build up” and “accumulating tension” sound less like inspiration than engineering. She frames looking as a timed event, something you can compose the way a musician composes anticipation - not by telling the viewer what to feel, but by designing conditions where feeling becomes unavoidable.

The key move is the pivot from “sensation” to “perceptual experience.” Sensation is raw stimulus; perceptual experience is cognition catching up with the body. Riley’s intent isn’t to decorate the eye but to expose the eye’s labor: how we stitch fragments into depth, motion, vibration, stability. The “release” is subtextually a kind of payoff that doesn’t belong to narrative or symbolism; it belongs to the nervous system. That’s why her work can feel both thrilling and slightly adversarial. You don’t stand outside it interpreting; you’re recruited into completing it.

Context matters: Riley comes of age in postwar British abstraction and shows prominence in the 1960s, when optical art gets folded into mass culture (fashion, design, advertising) and dismissed as fad. Her wording counters that dismissal. She’s claiming seriousness without romantic mystique: art as a structured experiment in attention, where the viewer’s perception is not a passive window but the medium itself.