Last weekend, we went to the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Indianapolis (IMA) and they had a small room with their optic art collection. I was pretty blown away with the craft of the paintings of Victor Vasarely. Usually when artists want to paint straight lines in a canvas they use masking tape. This makes the edges of color look really crappy. In Vasarely's work is not the case...the borders of color are beautiful, creating a stronger optical illusion overall. Another impressive thing is the calculated gradiations of color. As an artist myself, it is hard to imagine how to keep track of such a wide and yet similar color palette using oil paint. It definitely does the illusion trick... Op-artists were really amazing. They're the predecessors to all image processing algorithms and, their gestalist understanding of our complex visual system and it's relation to the brain was fundamental for the development of computer graphics.
My girlfriend got me for christmas a really amazing book called 'optic art' by another 'OP' named Rene Parola. You can actually get this book for really cheap through dover, they reprinted it recently. She got me the 1969 one because she's a sweetie. Anyways, the book is really awesome. It does give you the explanation of why we perceive all these optical illusions that were used extensively throughout OP. For all people working within visual languages, please be aware of our visual/perceptual system.
