Monday, January 31, 2011

What is Optical Art?

What do you see?

Today I'm going to post about Optical Art, also know as Op Art. Recently, I saw the works of an Indonesian optical artist, I was quite intrigued that I went and look for more op art samples on the internet and learned a little bit on the history of the art.

Is it moving to you? Credits to Ms Kavel Rafferty.

Op art was surely born ages ago, but the term was first invented in 1964 by Time Magazine. Op Art portrays an illusion of movement even though the art does not actually move.

Victor Vasarely (1908-1997) was a pioneer of this art. He was a Hungarian-French. He believed that artist should be universal: create art for everyone, not just for those high-end mass. Vasarely worked in advertising during the the '30s, and from this experience he developed a three-dimensional effect utilizing geometrical tricks. The simple rule was to make farther objects looks smaller. In the example below, the red area's circles are smaller, and the circles in the center was increasingly made bloated in size, both to create an illusion of depth/closeness.


Op art was then adopted by fashion and clothing industry. You might have seen it before, it's that weird and exotic pattern on your previously grandma's/mom's young clothes, but nowadays it might be on your friends/daughters. Now you know that to give them for their birthday!
Credits to Shiny Style and Fendi.

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