Creative Hub: Optical Art

Optical Art is a style of visual art that uses optical illusions. Artists use shapes, colours and patterns in special ways to create images that look as if they are moving or blurring. They give the viewer the impression of movement, hidden images, flashing and vibrating patterns, or of swelling or warping.

Optical Art exists to fool the eye. Optical compositions create a sort of visual tension, in the viewer's mind, that gives works the illusion of movement. Optical art started in the 1960s.

Bridget Riley, Victor Vasarely and Jesus Rafael Soto were three of the most important optical artists.

Artists create optical art in two primary ways. The first, best known method, is to create effects through pattern and line. Often these paintings are black and white or in the other method black and white wavy lines are drawn close to one another on the canvas surface, creating a volatile figure-ground relationship.

In 1965 BRIDGET RILEY began to produce color-based optical art. In that he added the element of contrasting colors that produce different effects on the eye.

This new art form first attracted international attention with the Optical exhibition “The Responsive Eye” at the Museum Of Modern Art in New York city in 1965.

Realistically any Optical Art surface is flat, static, and two-dimensional.
It is more like abstract art in which composition, movement, and shape dominate.
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 Optical Art style.
The critical techniques used in Optical Art are perspective and careful juxtaposition of color.
In the composition, quite often two high-contrast colors are placed next to each other.
In optical art, both positive and negative space have equal importance. So artists tend to focus just as much on the negative space as they do the positive.