As I was reading through the text book, Bridget Riley's "Current" on page 139 stood out to me. Before even reading the section about it, my mind jumped backed to 6th grade when we learned about optical illusions and such. When I read what Op Art was all about, I found the concept really interesting. Like most pieces of art, what a person sees is truly in the eye of the beholder, but here it isn't as much as what you see as how you see it.
What I took out most from this piece, or perhaps even the whole style of op art, was that any artist or person can give someone a picture, but they cannot tell them what to do with it. It is up to the viewer to decide what to make of it. With op art, to adequately determine what to make of the art you have to look at it in your own special way (even though that sounds kind of cheesy in a sense). For example when I look at this piece above, I see a valley with two parallel streams running through it. It's kind of hard with this picture because the lines are bigger but if you look in the book you might see what I'm getting at.
Another aspect of op art that I found fascinating was its capabilities to make it look like the piece has movement within it. When you stare at an op art piece long enough, the lines seem to vibrate or move ever so slightly. I think that gives the art a sense of added life. Sure, technically it isn't moving and will never really move, but just the sense that it appears to be moving is enough. Op art to me contains more life within it than most other works of art that we have studied so far.
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