Bridget Riley is one of Britains
best-known artists, celebrated
since the mid-1960s for her
distinctive, optically vibrant
paintings, called “Op Art.” She
exploits optical phenomena so
that a work appears to flicker,
pulsate or move. The vibrant
black-and-white optical pattern
paintings, which she painted in
the 1960s, were hugely popular
and became almost a hallmark
of the period.
She is interested in
visual effects,
commenting:
the eye can travel over
the surface in a way
parallel to the way it
moves over nature. It
should feel caressed
and soothed,
experience frictions and
ruptures, glide and drift
One moment, there will
be nothing to look at
and the next second the
canvas seems to refill,
to be crowded with
visual events.
White Disks,” 1964, Bridget Riley. She wrote that “…the uncertainties of a
drawn structure increase when it is composed of similar, repeated elements.
Because they are small and compacted, these elements begin to fuse while
they are easy to separate when they are big.”
Movement of
Squares
Bridget Riley is one of the finest exponents of Op Art, with her subtle
variations in size, shape and position of blocks within the overall
pattern. Her work is characterised by its intensity and its often
disorientating effect. Indeed the term 'Riley sensation' was coined to
describe this effect of looking at the paintings, especially her early
black and white pictures. Riley is fascinated with the act of looking
and in her work aims to engage the viewer not only with the object of
their gaze but also with the actual process of observation.
Bridget Riley
Horizontal Vibration, 1961
Tempera on Hardboard, 171/2x551/2
in
Simultaneous contrast is most intense when the two colors are complementary colors.
Complementary colors are pairs of colors, diametrically opposite on a color circle red
and green, blue and yellow as seen in Newtons color circle. Yellow complements blue:
yellow and blue lights, mixed, generate white light.
For thousands of years, artists have exploited the effect of juxtaposing complementary
colors, without understanding it in neurophysiological terms. Few artists have made as
dramatic a use of complementary colors as Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890), illustrated
below. Both were painted in Arles in the same month of 1888.
Blaze 1
Fall
Descending
Arrest 1
Breathe
Cataract 3
Orient 4