With this update, we are doing something a bit different and featuring some of the works of a younger generation than normal – the potential Op Artists of the future. Working with glue, paper strips and computer art software the children of Maryland Primary School have come up with these 4 excellent pieces bases on the ‘middle period’ (1980s) works of Bridget Riley. For examples of Bridget Riley’s work from this period see Achean and ‘Big Blue’ here.

All our ‘Junior Op Artists’ featured are from a Reception class, so are aged 4. Deputy Head Lorraine says “Bridget Riley’s work is wonderful for children that age to use, as they get to develop so many of their motor skills working with the paper strips.” I’d also add that it gives them great insight into the interactions of colour and shape. Thanks so much to Dale, Lorraine and the pupils of Maryland Primary school for making this happen.

Stephen was born in Derby (UK), and from an early age knew his vocation was to be an artist. He attended Derby College of Art and then Canterbury College of Art. At Canterbury he encountered a group of artists heavily influenced by American post-painterly abstraction as well as the School of Paris. This modernist inheritance was to shape the path of Stephen’s development. After graduating he moved to London where he set up a studio in Dalston with a group of fellow artists. Together they organised a number of exhibitions as well as producing a series of artist’s books. In 1991 he moved to a new studio in South East London until eventually joining the Art in Perpetuity Trust, in Deptford, in 1995. He has exhibited widely throughout the UK, most recently Invaluable at the APT Gallery, and his work is in private collections in the UK, Europe and the USA.

Stephen’s work is constantly informed and invigorated by a variety of sources, not only painting and sculpture (historical and contemporary) but also by music, literature, architecture and motor-racing. Travels in Europe and to New York have also provided many ideas.

Delacroix asserted that “the first duty of painting is to be a feast for the eye” and this is very much Stephen’s view – the splendour of pattern on surface, the ballet of forms in space and the visual possibilities that they generate. You can see more of Stephen Jaques’ work on his website.

The latest update to the gallery features some of the work of Op Artist Torrin Smart. Now living in Glastonbury, Torrin has concentrated on creating exclusively Op Art based work for the previous 10 years, although it has only been recently that he has begun to show his work in public. The reason for focusing on Op Art comes from his belief that “the style has so much unrealised potential – not just to create amazing backgrounds, but to create whole worlds or universes filled with lifeforms of a geometric nature”. Although he very much admires Op Artists such as Riley and Vasarely, he does not feel ‘influenced’ by them – “I felt inspired to draw one day and this style came out almost fully formed; it seems the most obvious way to put across ideas and thought forms visually.”

Torrin creates his work almost in reverse and usually starts with no clear idea of how the final work is going to be structured. Working purely with pencils, pens, rulers, compasses, protractors and his imagination, Torrin starts by drawing out and completing the foreground objects before beginning work on what sits behind them: “If you were to draw one of these objects as a pencil line drawing you would still not know its effect in black and white ink or later with the application of colour, so each object is fully formed before moving on to the next objective in the picture”.

Originals of Torrin’s work are for sale. If you are interested then please contact us from the contact page.

Mark has exhibited widely at galleries, foundations, and museums throughout the United States and Europe since the mid-1980s. In 1999 his work was included in “Post- Hypnotic”, a three year travelling museum exhibition which examined the resurgence of optical effects in the work of twenty-eight painters from the United States, Europe and Japan. His most recent exhibitions were at Minus Space (2008), Nyehaus (2007), McKenzie Fine Art (2006), Up & Company, (2005).

The path to Mark’s current work began in the early nineties with a reduction in his palette to the minimal set of red, yellow, blue, black and white.

A series of paintings – ‘Primary sequences’ – created using this minimal colour set and based on simple geometric shapes ensued, but Mark felt that there was something missing; something that had been discarded from the foundation of 20th Century Geometric Art: classical perspective. Starting first with one-point perspective line paintings using the primary colour set, Mark gradually turned his attention to the dead centre of a square canvas, first tracing dots in pencil with a circle template as one long spiral string and then ‘painting in’ these dots using his minimal palette and creating in the process a fascinating optical effect.

“Funny, I never set out to make Op Art. As far as my work is concerned, I much prefer the term systematic painting. The opticality is just the sexy part, the by-product of the real issue at hand, which is structure.”

For fans of the Lemonheads… that’s Mark’s painting on the cover of ‘Varshons’. If you’re interested in purchasing any of Mark’s work, there are some very inexpensive prints here. To find out more about Mark and his work, look here. A video of Mark’s Op/kinetic sculpture can be found here

In this months gallery update we’re featuring the work of London based Op Artist Chris Tucker. Chris has studied both at East Ham Art School and Chelsea School of Art and has been concentrating on Op Art since the late 1960s. “I believe that combining psychology and mathematics to create optical abstract pictures that are exciting, disturbing, alluring and beautiful is the purest form of creative activity.”

The six works we’ve featured were created using geometry, number series, colour theory and a lot of artistic experience. Chris works within the software package QuarkXpress to “ensure complete accuracy and adherence to the predetermined principles set down for the creation of each optical composition. This program… provides almost infinite possibilities to generate extremely complex geometrical images. For me it is critical that these pictures are not affected by reproductive techniques, as colour, tone and line need to be as flat and devoid of texture as possible.” The final works, over 1 metre square in size, are printed on an Epson 11880 printer using nine archival pigmented inks and are then laminated with matt pressure sensitive laminate.

Chris additionally works with pencil and pen and ink on paper, wood and Perspex for sculptural pieces and acrylic household or oil paint on canvas, plywood or MDF. Chris sells his work. If you are interested in buying a painting, you can contact Chris via his website.