Op Art (pt. 3)

Yaacov Agam, an Israeli-born artist, is another of the art movement's leading contributors.  His works often feature thin, fixed strips that project from the surface of a painting in vertical rows.  His art is frequently colorful and kinetic.  Our eye continually traces over the breadth of the visual area because we are met with such a vivid overabundance of colorful activity and shapes.  It looks chaotic, but it's actually extremely ordered.  The attention to design which characterizes so many of these types of artworks is still a popular element of certain branches of art today.

Op Art (pt. 2)

This is another good example of Op Art.  Bridget Riley frequently used black-and-white images such as this to produce the effect of an optical illusion in her artworks.  Here we see a unique mix of reversing patterns that narrow and shrink in circular fashion toward a round, empty center, which our eye naturally looks to.  When you're looking at the center of the work, however, do you notice the way the black lines all around it seem to be moving?  This is an optical trick easily achieved once learned but requiring exact precision in order to work.  Riley's canvases had to be mathematically structured in order to produce the proper effect.  In order for you to get the full effect, you might want to enlarge the image by clicking on it; but I wouldn't blame you for not looking at it too long.  This kind of art gives me headaches.

Op Art (pt. 1)

A nonobjective art movement began in the U.S. after 1960.  Taking Pop Art to a further extreme, artists of this style sought to create unconventional, extraordinary images based on the sciences of visual perception.  Op Art, as it was thus called, was a style that tried to create an impression of movement on the picture surface by means of optical illusion.

Bridget Riley was among the most prolific of Op Art artists.  Her canvases show dizzying images of lines and colors in certain patterns which the human eye perceives to be active.  She used gradual changes of color and wavy lines to add a sense of movement in this work, entitled Cataract 3.  The effect works best when you enlarge the image (just click on the artwork to view the bigger version).  The lines appear to be moving, don't they?  I think the trick is to look at the work dead on; your eye naturally glides over the picture, and this, in turn, generates the effect of moving lines.

It is perhaps no coincidence that art of this caliber rose to popularity in the 1960s and '70s, sometimes called "the psychedelic era."  While artwork such as this is maybe more communicable to people on drugs, the inherent themes of such a work bring out much of the popular sentiment of that time.  Riley herself is known to have taken inspiration from various Modern and Postmodern literary sources and built off of themes of warped reality, unclear morality and purpose in the world, and the perceived ability of science to degenerate humankind as well as to improve it.  We gaze into a strange kind of dystopia when we look into these works.  By fooling the brain or the eye with deceptive, illusionary images, our perception of the world and reality is brought to the table for questioning; and our personal sense of humanness is challenged as we find that we can no longer even trust our own eyes to accurately see what's painted on a canvas.