Continuing with our fortnightly artist study I recently hosted a session to look at the work of Bridget Riley. This was a fun artist to look at as her Op Art is very unlike the other art we have looked at together.
Why Bridget Riley?
Throughout the sessions that I have run, I have sought to showcase a range of artists and different artistic styles. Bridget Riley’s work is really interesting and I wanted to see how the children would interpret it.
She is also a living artist like some of the others we have studied which I think helps the children to feel a bit more connected to them.
Materials Needed
For this session, I provided the children with the Bridget Riley sheets from the bundles below
- Famous Artist Research Brochure (from TpT)
- Famous Artist Colouring Pages (from TpT)
- Famous Artist Paper Dolls (From TpT)
How I ran the Session
I introduced Bridget Riley and talked about her early life and childhood. I referenced the Jackson Pollock exhibition that she visited and how this had an impact on her and led to her own artistic work. I talked about how she was working at an ad agency and her work was initially based on pointillism.
We then talked about Op Art and what it is and how it’s designed to be disorientating. I talked about how she initially focussed on black and white images but how she then went on to introduce colour by the later 60s and how her work was inspired by a trip to Egypt in the 1980s.
I then had some of Bridget Riley’s work to share with the children. We looked at a range of her work and talked about how it made us feel, and how the optical illusions played out. Some of us could see colour where it wasn’t and some of us felt very disconcerted by the images that appeared to move!
We liked her early black and white work a lot, and this proved to provide a lot of talking points with the children as they shared their thoughts on it.
Art Activity
I had provided the children with a couple of images to colour in to create their own Op Art. One was to create this Op Art hand activity and another was just a pattern which they could colour in and see how that looked once they’d finished.
I also shared a really cool video with different Op Art ideas in and I know some children went on to create their own Op Art using different shapes. We did one using straight lines and circles as shown below.
Follow up with my own children
With my own children, we have followed this up by adding to our artist project book and adding Bridget Riley to our World Map.
We enjoyed looking at her work again together as well as the Op Art video shared below. We really enjoyed the Op Art we created using the circles and lines and it was really effective to do.
I think I would learn a bit of I attended these sessions – the children are better informed than me!
Hi, I came upon your post from a Google search for ‘Bridget Riley children’s books’. There’s an illustration from what looks like a children’s book pictured at the top, and I’m wondering where it came from. Was this in a children’s book? Did you create this image? I’m looking for a book I can share with little ones next year when I’ll be doing classes on female abstract artists, since I plan to include Bridget Riley as one of the featured artists.