Stripes and Stripes

Bridget Riley

Until 1960 Bridget Riley mainly painted landscapes and figures in the impressionist style. She studied the Pointillists such as Georges Seurat and started to experiment with the way colours behave next to each other. She was strong influenced by Victor Vasarely and her work became more and more abstract and geometric. Riley painted intricate patterns that produce illusions of movement and many of her paintings include stripes of different widths.

Look at some of Riley’s paintings and see if the children can work out why they stripes look like they are moving (it is the way the stripes vary in width and the way they ripple). See if they can cut out coloured paper pieces and stick them on a different colour background to create the same effect.

Frank Stella

Stella is a contemporary American artist who used a lot of geometric shapes, lines and stripes in his early paintings. He received a high level of recognition at a young age and has since moved on to work in printmaking and latterly in sculpture. Frank Stella believes that what you see on the canvas is all that is there - he doesn’t want people to try and interpret his paintings in any way. His paintings are about the object he has painted rather than anything he is trying to say about the object. Stella has used ordinary decorators brushes and paint straight from a tin for many of his geometric and striped paintings.

Look at some Frank Stella paintings, especially the very geometric images and discuss the shapes and colours used. Ask the children to talk about which is their favourite and why they like it.

Op Art

The name stands for Optical Art because these abstract works often create an optical illusion. Shapes and colours are manipulated so that an actual pulsation or flickering is perceived by the human eye. Many paintings contain geometric shapes and stripes that vary in width to create the illusion of movement.

A lot of Op Art is done in black and white. Compare a number of different pictures and ask the children to comment on how the images appear to move. See if they can work out why this happens.