Creativity Quote by Bridget Riley

Riley’s line lands like a dare aimed at modernity: painting, she suggests, survives precisely because it’s out of step. Calling it “inevitably… archaic” isn’t self-deprecation so much as a diagnosis. Painting can’t pretend to be the newest medium in the room; it’s slow, manual, stubbornly tied to the body and to materials that refuse frictionless “updates.” In an era that prizes speed, scalability, and tech sheen, that refusal becomes a kind of power.

The loaded word here is “spiritual,” and Riley uses it with an artist’s pragmatism rather than a preacher’s certainty. She’s not necessarily invoking religion; she’s naming the non-instrumental part of looking and making. Painting depends on a viewer willing to submit to attention - to stay long enough for perception to reorganize itself. That’s a spiritual value in the secular sense: patience, receptivity, inward calibration. It’s also an implicit critique of a culture that treats images as disposable units of content.

Context matters: Riley’s Op Art is famously optical, even scientific in effect, yet it’s handmade. Her work creates vibration and instability on the retina, but it’s built through disciplined touch. So the subtext is a defense of painting as an ancient technology for altering consciousness. Archaic doesn’t mean obsolete; it means anchored. Riley is arguing that painting’s relevance isn’t in competing with new media, but in offering what new media struggles to: sustained, embodied seeing that feels, quietly, like meaning.