How does op art work

Some op artists made artworks that don't just look as if they are moving — they actually ARE moving! Art that moves is sometimes called kinetic art. The artwork above is by an artist called Julio Le Parc who often created mobiles.

To make this work he has hung lots of tiny bits of metal onto almost invisible suspended threads. These bits of metal jiggle and move slightly with any breeze, and their shadows on the white background also jiggle and move.

Can you see the shadows? Op Art Does this picture make your eyes go funny? You might like. Who is Bridget Riley? Op Art exists to fool the eye. Op compositions create a sort of visual tension in the viewer's mind that gives works the illusion of movement.

For example, concentrate on Bridget Riley's "Dominance Portfolio, Blue" for even a few seconds and it begins to dance and wave in front of your eyes. Realistically, you know that any Op Art piece is flat, static, and two-dimensional. Your eye, however, begins sending your brain the message that what it's seeing has begun to oscillate, flicker, throb and any other verb one can employ to mean, "Yikes!

This painting is moving! Op Art is not meant to represent reality. Due to its geometrically-based nature, Op Art is, almost without exception, non-representational. Artists do not attempt to depict anything we know in real life.

Instead, it is more like abstract art in which composition, movement, and shape dominate. Op Art is not created by chance.

The elements employed in a piece of Op Art are carefully chosen to achieve maximum effect. In order for the illusion to work, each color, line, and shape must contribute to the overall composition. It takes a great deal of forethought to successfully create artwork in the Op Art style. Op Art relies on two specific techniques. The critical techniques used in Op Art are perspective and careful juxtaposition of color.

The color may be chromatic identifiable hues or achromatic black, white, or gray. Even when color is used, they tend to be very bold and can be either complementary or high-contrast. Op Art typically does not include the blending of colors. The lines and shapes of this style are very well defined. Artists do not use shading when transitioning from one color to the next and quite often two high-contrast colors are placed next to each other.

This harsh shift is a key part of what disturbs and tricks your eye into seeing movement where there is none. Op Art embraces negative space. In Op Art—as in perhaps no other artistic school—positive and negative spaces in a composition are of equal importance. The illusion could not be created without both, so Op artists tend to focus just as much on the negative space as they do the positive. Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Bridget Riley is one of the best-known Op Art painters, famous for her striking murals composed of multiple stripes which create optical illusions for the viewer.

Her black and white geometric patterns explore the dynamism of sight and produce a disorienting effect on the eye, creating an illusion of movement and colour. She currently lives and works in both the United Kingdom and France. He was one of the founders and foremost exponents of Op Art during the late s and early s. He graduated and went to Yale and, interestingly enough, was taught by Josef Albers for some time.

Anuszkiewicz is still actively painting today. Morellet continually explored a wide range of practices and incorporated diverse materials into his work such as steel, iron, adhesive tape, wire mesh and wood. He was convinced that painting was the discipline of the past, so he advocated the use of new materials like neon, that eventuallz became the main element of his aesthetic language. Many of his works, that bear inexplicable titles, rely on the interaction of the observer due to electrical systems that turn them on and off.

Artists today enhance the scope and range of the Op Art movement and continue to draw on earlier investigations while continuing to expand it into three-dimensional space.