We have seen how subliminal decorating patterns build or burden energy in our decorating. Now, in Patterns and Symbols in Decorating, Lesson VII, D – What to Do, we can see how to corral our symbols to create a more pattern-based living space.
Example 1 – What to Do
Everyone has pictures of their family and friends, travels and momentous occasions scattered around their home or office, usually in color. We have learned in The Gestalt Laws of Perception, Lesson V that the eye seeks out like things and uses them as a fixations (The smaller than nanosecond time the eye rests on one part of the visual field.). Color, via the Law of Similarity, pulls the eye to it as a fixation and repeated fixations create a scaffolding. Designers manipulate that aspect of the eye/brain when they repeat a color throughout a room. The problem with colored photos is that they are a mixture of colors, and they are impossible to site strategically for a good scaffolding.
When we have lots of colored photos scattered about, it is challenging to the eye. Now, people love their photos and indeed they are nice ego symbols. Nonetheless, they create fixations that do need to be corralled before the eye bounces all over the place. Not every group of pictures is a good pattern. I find the above photos problematic in creating a harmonious space.
Several things we can do.
- Display fewer photographs. Keep some in a drawer and rotate them.
- Frame the photographs in a uniform color and style with a dominant, thick frame (Law of Similarity.) Keep them close together to contain them as a unit. (Law of Proximity.) Place them on a nice tray (the Gestalt law of Common Region) of the same color and material as the frames. Small fixations are seen as one, relaxing the eye. If pictures are in the office, pin them on a cloth-covered bulletin board. Each photograph should have the same color matting or edged backing.
- Change from color to black and white, sepia or muted antique colors, and use the same type of frame on each, though not as thick. They may be placed throughout the room grouped or in a harmonious path.
We shouldn’t try to live without our symbols. Healthy forms of symbol-seeing may be souvenirs from trips, refrigerator magnets, grandma’s dishes, various knickknacks, and family photographs grouped on a living room table or on the wall of an office cubicle.
Still, no matter how good the symbols are, if their placement does not uphold a harmonious scaffolding, they take down the design and rob it of energy.
Some Good Examples
Example 2 – What to Do
Perhaps the most prolific examples of symbol-seeing are related to raising children. Their egos are developing every moment and need to be strengthened. Ego symbols must be visible as reminders. Children forget what is not in front of them. Too many symbols, though, make a harmonious environment hard to create. We must maintain and support the child’s innate ability to relate to patterns and create an environment that promotes calm
Unaddressed children’s areas are soon filled with bins spilling Legos and horizontal surfaces covered with the purple and pink plastic remains of princess mythology and action figure toys.
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Eventually, children’s symbolism fills the rest of the house with refrigerator magnets, layers of scotch tape attached to drawings on every vertical surface, and scattered toys and ubiquitous plastic childcare paraphernalia in primary colors. Harmonious scaffolding and peace are lost when needed most.
Symbols placed without acknowledging the scaffolding do more harm than good. We need not eliminate them, but we do have to contain them. We can buy plain containers to house the various play materials of our children’s lives. If time permits, we can sort them and teach our children to do the same.
Words of Wisdom
“The secret to coming up with a good room for a child is respect,” wrote John Wheatman in Meditations on Design. For example, he said, a drawing or painting stuck among other things on the fridge won’t seem special. Wheatman recommends using frames to display some — not all — of the child’s artworks. The works can be replaced as others are completed
Elevating the Ordinary
To create art, children are often given such lifeless materials as crayons and construction paper. For just a bit more money when I taught children, I found tinted papers without that dull, dusty construction paper look. Water-based markers can be improved upon as well. We can at least buy sets with more than primary colors. Some sets may cost more but are exquisite and worth it. (Consider two safe products: water-based Tombow or alcohol-based Copic markers.)
When the materials are elevated, a child’s construction becomes a noteworthy piece of art, and children’s art can be quite spectacular. In his later life, Picasso visited an exhibition of children’s drawings and he observed, “When I was their age, I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them.”
Giving Respect to Children’s Rooms
To calm and inspire our children, we should consider elevating their environment, too. Next, see an art room I designed to hide all art materials in boxes and containers, reducing the number of eye fixations. To further enhance the harmony, all the shelves and boxes were white. The only color was the children’s works arranged on the top of the shelves.
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Finally, let’s consider giving children toys based more on patterns than symbols. A childhood story of Frank Lloyd Wright’s illustrates why. His mother gave him a set of blocks that he believed made him as astonishingly creative as he was. Friedrich Froebel, the German education reformer who created the word “kindergarten” and its idea, designed the blocks in the 1830s to cultivate and shape young imaginations.
The effect on Wright’s creative ability was astounding, for he credited these blocks to all his future works:
“Mother learned that Friedrich Froebel taught that children should not be allowed to draw from casual appearances of Nature until they had first mastered the basic forms lying hidden behind appearances. Cosmic, geometric elements were what should first be made visible to the child mind.
The virtue in all this lay in the awakening of the child-mind to rhythmic structure in Nature – giving the child a sense of innate cause-and effect otherwise far beyond child-comprehension. I soon became susceptible to constructive pattern evolving in everything I saw. I learned to “see” this way and when I did, I did not care to draw casual incidentals of Nature…I wanted to design.”
Example 3 – What to Do
Everything we see registers through our eyes and minds. Our organs of perception initially take in only a few fixations. The more we have in our visual field, small and big, the more difficult it is to create a harmonious path. This includes intrusive advertising. One of my favorite interior designers Barbara Barry of BB Holmes hides cleaning supplies into unmarked containers: “Why should I advertise Tide,” she explains.
The lesson is to hide our toothpaste and shampoos, and use a design-appropriate bathroom soap dispenser instead of a dishwashing bottle on the kitchen sink. It is doable but difficult to create a good scaffolding with an ad logo. Jerry Seinfeld did it by keeping all his cereal boxes together behind a frosted glass door. Andy Warhol transcended advertising by doing the scaffolding in paintings and prints. Better to hide the stuff.
Excessive use of ego-symbols, however, like advertising logos, can create an overwhelming number of fixations, leading to greater difficulty in upholding a harmonious scaffolding. We neither want nor need advertising logos as messages to our subliminal self. One of the purposes of metaphysical design is to create healthy symbols based on patterns that affect us positively.
Example 4 – What to Do
A Thinking Exercise
The exercise that follows is to think about beauty and status and how they affect energy in our environment.
I always loved graffiti and taught my students how to paint in that style with the understanding that it would never be placed on someone else’s property without permission. Unfortunately, it was not a love shared by all. I remember helping my friend, Jerome Weinberger in the ’80s who had an avant-garde exhibit in Tiffany’s windows overseen by the legendary Gene Moore. When I interviewed Mr. Moore, I suggested using graffiti for the next store window. I could just see Tiffany’s $50,000 baubles protruding through the stars commonly adorning a graffiti piece.
That very fine gentleman, like so many other people I knew, gently pushed aside the idea. I could see in his eyes that graffiti was considered low class, a product of poor neighborhoods and often associated with vandalism. I was too early with my idea. Twenty years later graffiti became more mainstream and highly collectible artists like Keith Haring, Dela Vega and Bansky commanded top prices.
I would rather see a good graffiti piece than a Hermes scarf or a Louis Vuitton bag.
That, however, is just me. Everyone has there own idea of what is important.
The big question is are you choosing the object because it is beautiful or because it has status. If you start designing for status, you will begin to lose your ability to see pattern, just like the builders during the Greek Revival movement.
My Choice Led Me to a Find
Some of New Yorkers love to look at garbage for the hidden treasures that other New Yorkers throw out. It is not a hobby for the status minded. Occasionally, one can find a treasure.
One day I was walking and I passed a heap of garbage including a discarded poster. On the back I noticed some drawings in marker and immediately recognized a De La Vega. He often drew with rwith chalk on the sidewalk so I recognized his work.
So I got my trusty Xacto knife, a necessary tool for the garbage picking artist and freed the treasure. I framed it with uv protection museum glass and hung it out of the sun’s direct rays.
Today De La Vega is well known and a few people exclaim, “How did you get this? What did you pay?” I just smile.
What is Beautiful; What is Status; When are They the Same?
In the field of design, a great many artifacts are set to pose as status symbols, and status and beauty do not always go hand in hand. My writing is mostly about interior design but it is a good idea to look at clothes, cars and jewelry because they are more visibly marked. We need to ask the questions:
- Do I want it because it is beautiful?
- Do I want it because it has status?
- Could a status item be beautiful if it were removed from the status level?
- Could I find beauty in an object that lacks status like a pile of stones or a piece of art like street graffiti that has no possibility of being a status symbol.
- Can I look at an item of status and see it might be lacking in aesthetic appeal?
- Does the logo detract from the beauty of the design?
- Is the logo beautiful?
The Signal
There is also another component to most status items and that is the logo. Sometimes, it is just the logo that is in demand,. Note the rhinestone sneakers of Dolce & Gabbana Most of the design is the logo. In this case there is no pattern in the logo. The wearer is advertising a product with little energy..
So powerful is this need to own a status item to stroke the ego that there is a huge business in counterfeiting these objects. Hordes scramble to get these items with logos, indicating to the world that the individual is worth something. People who can’t afford them turn to the cheap knockoffs.
Occasionally, those who can squeeze their budget a bit will manage to pay for the real thing. I knew two people who harmed themselves and others by needing to have a logo. One had to buy her third Louie Vuitton bag even when her rent was months past due. Another had to enact her Sex and the City fantasy by wearing a pair of Christian Louboutin shoes at her wedding even though it meant the fairly small crowd had cheese and crackers for the hors d’oeuvres. Yes, trans-fat saltines can do harm.
Logos as Symbols
Logos are symbols. They might be even rich in pattern but their purpose is to pose. Jonah Berger in the NY Times bestseller Invisible Influence, the Hidden Forces that Shape Behavior calls these logos signals, which are meant to convey status. The louder and larger logos make them easier to counterfeit. Berger brings up an irony. If too many people end up with the same product, real or imitated, the logo is no longer wanted by the super-rich. since it no longer can act as a signal to each other.
As people spend money they don’t have on a designer logo, the super-rich have moved on. So, for way more money, an item can be bought with minimized logos, with just a subtle hint of the item’s importance. A more expensive Mercedes can have a slightly smaller, hood ornament – something that only the super rich would see as a signal. Berger says that for every $5,000 increase in price, the logo shrinks by one centimeter. Less prominent branding lies in the exclusivity that subtlety creates.
This phenomenon probably sounds ridiculous – people holding on to logos to make themselves into an elite group until the wannabes copy the logo, forcing the elite to diminish or eliminate it. It is almost laughable. Certainly Dr. Seuss thought so in his poem The Sneetches.
The Sneetches
The Sneetches were a group of yellow bird-like creatures, some of whom had a green star on their bellies. Sneetches with stars discriminated against and shunned those without.
A scammer, Sylvester McMonkey McBean takes advantage of the situation and for three dollars offers the Sneetches without stars the chance to get them with his Star-On machine.
The treatment is instantly popular until it upsets the original star-bellied Sneetches, for they are in danger of losing their special status. McBean then tells them for ten dollars they can use his Star-Off machine. The Sneetches who originally had stars happily pay the money to have them removed to remain special.
However, McBean does not share the prejudices of the Sneetches and allows the recently starred Sneetches through this machine as well. Ultimately this situation escalates, with the Sneetches running from one machine to the next…
…until neither the Plain nor the Star-Bellies knew
whether this one was that one… or that one was this one…
or which one was what one… or what one was who.
The back and forth continues until the Sneetches are penniless and McBean departs as a rich man, amused by their folly. Despite his assertion that “you can’t teach a Sneetch,” the Sneetches learn from this experience that neither plain-belly nor star-belly Sneetches are superior, and they are able to get along and become friends. Unlike the real world, all Sneetches, starred or unstarred, become friends and the race to prove superiority ends.
If only the human race, could behave like Sneetches
Interior Design
In interior design, furniture and other parts rarely come with logos. Viewers just know design status in other ways.
I remember in 2005, one of my students, Bernie from the inner city commented on his poverty status after leaving the South Bronx to enter Manhattan. It was the windows that got him. The apartments with high ceilings and tall windowed walls made him sad. I sort of felt guilty because on his way into Manhattan, he passed my neighborhood.
My husband bought our postage stamp apartment in the late ’80s when he didn’t think he would ever marry again. At the time, the neighborhood was considered on the edge of the inner city. Over time, it gentrified and over time we got married. Now we did not have tall windows but the area became highly desired.
Now Bernie probably has more room than we have. I have no room for a dresser or toaster oven or more than five pairs of shoes. Our kitchen is in the living room. I kind of like the challenge, We don’t have large glass windows but we have a safe environment. We also don’t have sadness.
Todays Walls of Glass
Fast forward from the late ’80s to today, tall thin, pencil towers are popping up everywhere in the southern area of Central Park, which has been coined by New Yorkers as billionaires’s row.
Each floor of the building is one apartment with lglass walls. They are Bernie’s vision on steroids.
They have ruined the Manhattan skyline but is worse is that are an ecological nightmare. So tall are these buildings (one is 1550 feet) that each casts a a shadow on Central Park robbing hours of sun. Now we are sad. The irony is that as these building kills tree, most New Yorks have to fight to grow plants indoors especially the trees, bonsais and rare specamins that hug the sky .
Status in Interior Design
Interior designs of the rich and famous were always pictured in design magazines. I often found them 80-90% lacking in pattern. Status was the message. They are almost impossible to provide good examples for people of modest means.
Since the isolation of COVID, however, interior design is now brought to us via social media. Celebrities selling their wares and just wanting to share has become more important. Speaking from their spacious homes, we get to see how the other side lives.
The Logos are Hidden in the Kitchens and Bathrooms
Aside from the windows, there are always majestic glass windows and symbols with patterns like marble, teak, stone and impeccable Italian design. There are no logos; you just know. The kitchens were crafted in custom cabinets with Wolf and Viking stoves and Thermidor and Subzero appliances. The bathrooms sport Villeroy & Boch, Paris Marble Sinks and the Japanese Toto toilet.
The New “It” Factor
After Chrissy Teigen, the model and cookbook author posted a picture advertising her new lounge ware line, thousands of people commented on her couch. It was a Bellini and suddenly everyone wanted to have one. It is now the “it” sofa of the rich and famous all over Instagram. According to British Vogue, “Its beautiful and bulbous, like a giant bunch of bubble wrap decided to wrap itself in voluptuous velvet.
The sofa has good lines. I hope buyers chose it for its beauty and not to pose.
Intent of Possession
I do not want to judge anyone’s need for a certain product. Designer products are well made and often save money in the end. Logos can also be quite beautiful. When Berger calls a logo a signal, I call the signal “a symbol in action” designed to pull us to a certain behavior. And often that behavior is to pose.
Beauty is something that can be imbedded in these objects. We can use it to pose, or we can use it to energize. Is it our ego that connects to beauty or is it our subliminal self, the part of which tickles our souls? Beauty can never be used to best another or to elevate our position in life. It is an incredible gift from the Universe, and we should never misuse it to make ourselves feel better than others. By taking beauty and using it to pose, we start to unlearn how to see patterns and thus beauty. As we continue to unlearn, we begin to create non-harmonious environments which then deplete our energy.
In Conclusion
In metaphysical decorating, the intended outcome is to find more peace, harmony and energy. I first discovered this principle when I worked in the inner-city schools. My purpose then was to stop vandalism, but eventually my motivation was to elevate the students’ self-perceptions. By making the environment appear rich, we could offer them possibilities of potential. This mirror of the future was designed to create advertisements, a kind of “advertising the Self to the self.” People’s belief systems and their environments exist in parallel. If poor self-esteem creates a poor environment, its reflection acts like a feedback loop on the observer. To change self-esteem, one must first change the mirror.
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Decorating is the mirror. Beauty is the energy. All beautiful objects are based on patterns. Beauty can then become a symbol of our potential self, working as a feedback loop to change us and, in turn, our changed self creates more beauty. So, my decorated classrooms, enriched with the patterns of nature, became a symbol of self-worth and potential. The designs in the rooms became a message to the students that they were worth more than their previous environment intended. I was trying to get their egos connected to their souls.
Too often, however, items of beauty become symbolic for the ego, and in so doing, mistakes are made. We cannot always see when the ego has taken over to distort a pattern like the boxwoods or Greek revival architecture. It becomes difficult to properly hold a design idea in our minds like color. The ego can make a patterned symbol represent the opposite of its intended meaning, We can choose uplifting symbols but destroy the room’s energy by not paying attention to pattern. It is easy to confuse beauty with status or allow other interests to impose symbols in our surroundings.
We Create Our Own Destinies
Kenneth Burke described man as “a symbol-using, symbol making, and symbol misusing animal. to suggest that a person creates symbols as well as misuses them. This means we have a choice.
As human beings, we have tremendous power to design or have others design what we see and reinterpret it or have others interpret for us. We:
- Create or have others create our visual field, which is particularly true of public space where we have no individual say.
- Design or have others create what we see and then become affected by it.
- Make symbols, and like a feed-back loop, they give messages back to us. Often the effect is not in our best interest.
Creating Forward
I recommend we start actively choosing our symbols and not have them chosen for us. We can place them to create scaffolding, which in itself is a symbol that can feed the unconscious aspects of the human persona. In a sense, when we do that, we reflect ourselves to ourselves, for the scaffolding based on nature and our physical being are the same. We advertise our true Self to the self, our subliminal spirits to our egos.
When we look at an article of beauty, one based on the geometry of nature, we see ourselves because a truly beautiful object and the human body has the same mathematical underpinnings to its scaffolding. Creating an article of beauty, we connect with it because it has the same geometrical structure of ourselves and the Universe. When we see this structure on a subliminal level, there is a “rush.” We connect to the mathematics of creation.
It is my hope through these lessons we choose our symbols wisely, and more importantly, manipulate them in our visual field to create the underlying symbol of reality. Our job in life is not to respond to the advertisements of products or the work of status designers but to create our own symbols that nourish all parts of our being by designing in the patterns of creation. Our job is to advertise our potential self to the present self by creating an environment rich in the symbols desired by the subliminal self.
The trick to all of this is to understand that everything we see creates a pattern, that these patterns affect us and to decorate, we must learn to manipulate these patterns. We have to choose the symbols that are good for us and then make these symbols part of the design.
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There are two parts to this website, The Lessons, which are more difficult in concept, and the blogs, which are lighter in nature. Blogs that you might enjoy with the same theme as Small Spaces are:
Two Lessons that relate to this blog are:
Please note that my website allows you to leave comments at the end of the blogs but not at the end of each lesson. If you have a comment or question about a lesson, you may email me at ruta@rutas-rules.com
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