Bridget Riley, Movement in Squares, 1961

Op-art (optical-art) is stark, often minimal art that plays on optical illusion. While the idea of optical illusion art might immediately make you think of those Magic Eye books from the 90's, there is no hidden picture in these that you need to cross your eyes to see. But rather when simply viewing the art, looking at the canvases, the viewer gets the impression of movement, warping or flashing.

If you think of op-art and imagine some vague notion of a 60's mod, psychedelic aesthetic, you are on the right track. Much of this art was produced during the early 60's and did later get co-opted by the mainstream at large in various commercial contexts. Bridget Riley, an original op-artist tried to (unsuccessfully) sue a company for using her art as fabric design.

Precisonism is a truly American form of painting, a style that could really not have been made anywhere else. The inspiration for the art was the country's industrial landscape. This was close in time to the second industrial revolution. Machines had been a part of the cultural landscape, but now more than ever before, major factories were popping up left and right. The term for the style of art was coined during the 20's, the movement itself is generally said to have happened after World War 1 in the inter-war period.

These factories and buildings were the inspiration for the art, and in a pretty direct way. These artistrs's canvases were filled with images of factories, smokestacks, machines and buildings. They weren't painted in a traditional realist style, but were not majorly abstract either. The inspriation for the style was largely cubism, the images in the paintings became somewhat choppy, depicting in pieces of hard edged, geometrical forms that end up almost giving the illusion of motion, of a wobbly building.

Today on our walk through art history, you will be swiftly met by action painting. This is the style of painting that so many of us often think of when we hear the words: abstract art. The image of a slap of paint unconsciously thrown across a canvas comes to mind. Think Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning and Franz Kline.

It was during the 40's and 50's that this style of art first came into it's own. It was the jazzy, hip New York School of painters that first started owning action painting and working exclusively in this aesthetic. The process of putting the paint on canvas could have been seen as performance art itself, and this unconscious action was really what the heart of the movement was all about. The artists smeared, dribbled, threw and splashed paint onto their canvases, Pollock famously hid things like cigarette butts in his.

Sculpture 25, by Jen Stark

2010 is upon us! A new decade unfolding before our eyes that will surely bring it's own regrettable trends and revolutionary ideas in the art-world. In the regular-world art is slower, impressionist paintings that were at the time considered to be “not real art” are now revered the world over as true masterpieces. And it seems many people are still coming around to the modern and abstract art of the last mid-century. Art has undergone many metamorphosis in the past century, but one might not know it as the art from a hundred-plus years ago remain the undisputed masterpieces for many people.

Whether or not you thought we'd have flying cars by now, we are living in the 21^st century, onto the second decade—this is the future! We've got cutting edge technology, but in a lot of ways cutting edge aesthetics have not totally caught up. With these thoughts in mind, I'd like to ring in the new year by taking a look at the recent trends in art of the past decade, and where we have really come in the past 100 years.

On our recent trip to Greece, my husband and I saw them everywhere: taped to the dashboards of buses, crammed one above the other in tiny cave chapels, centered in the omnipresent roadside shrines, propped up besides cash registers in bakeries, lining the walls of gift shops, and – of course—in places of adoration in Greek Orthodox churches. Highly symbolized icons, images of Christ and the saints, seemed to be everywhere.

The painted icons generally showed several figures (sometimes a scene, but more often just one or two individuals) sitting, with a solid background of metal or gold leaf, for the viewer to reflect upon. The Virgin Mary and her son Jesus were the most common subjects, shown in several repeated poses: Christos Pantokrator (“Christ Almighty”, grasping the New Testament in his left hand and holding his right hand up in blessing) and Maria Glykophilousa (“Mary of Loving Kindness”, holding her young son and gently touching her cheek to his), just to name two. The poses that go with each name are very specific, and the title always matches the way the figures are standing and what they are holding.