Creativity Quote by Bridget Riley

Riley’s line lands like a polite correction to anyone who thinks Op Art is just eye-candy geometry. “I work with nature” is a claim of lineage: she’s placing her studio practice in the long tradition of artists who study perception, light, and movement the way landscapists studied trees and weather. Then comes the pivot - “although in completely new terms” - which is both manifesto and boundary marker. She’s not painting leaves; she’s rebuilding the conditions under which “leaf-ness” is seen.

The intent is strategic. Riley refuses the old split between abstraction and the “natural world,” arguing that nature isn’t only a subject matter but a set of behaviors: vibration, pulse, rhythm, optical instability. Her stripes and curves don’t imitate objects; they trigger bodily responses - the micro-stutters of the eye, the sense that a static surface is somehow alive. That’s the subtext: perception is physical, not purely intellectual, and the body is the real site of the image.

Context matters because Riley emerges in a postwar Britain obsessed with systems, science, and new media, while modernism is busy declaring painting either dead or purified. Her phrase quietly rebukes both camps. She’s not chasing novelty for its own sake; she’s updating the contract between art and the viewer. “New terms” suggests experimentation, but also negotiation: a recalibration of how looking works in an era of screens, speed, and overstimulation. Nature, in Riley’s hands, becomes less a pastoral refuge than a rigorous engine for sensation.