You are walking into a friend’s house for the first time and when you walk into the living room and all you see is white. You look all around you, but you do not see any furniture. You start to feel a sense of panic because the room feels so empty and hostile. You wonder why you’re in the room and what its purpose is. The room has the lighting of a hospital setting and you wonder if you’ve been sick. As you start to wander the halls all the rooms look the same and you are not able to tell where you are or which way you are going. The house begins to feel more like solitary confinement instead of feeling like home. You have the sudden urge to leave and you begin to think of excuses to go home.
All the sudden color flashes before your eyes. You start to see the room fill with a light colored wooden floor and sky-blue walls. You start to smell the scent of fresh wood that is most likely from a glade air freshener. The room fills with windows and you start to get the feeling that the room is inviting you to sit on the newly placed dark brown couch. The couch and loveseat pair look comfortable without being too big and you see a nude color rug in the floor. The walls start to fill up with brown branches that become towering trees before you. You realize quickly that the trees on the walls are filling up with birds. The red birds are painted so intricately that you can almost hear them chirping in the distance. You sit on the couch and begin to relax as your body adjusts to the new scents and designs before you. You look over to your right and you see a wooden table that looks like it’s been cut right from the forest and brought into the room. The room begins to feel like a home as more decorations are being brought to life. These new additions are not overwhelming, and they bring a certain charm to the room. You touch a golden flower vase that looks like it has been imported from Japan and you are mesmerized by the pink peonies that are blooming from the vase. The room lights up now and as you look above you see a brown chandelier looking down at you. The once frightening room now fills with life and you no longer feel like you’re in a strange place.
Imagine what would happen if rooms had no decorations to feel the large spaces. People have such a sense of warmth when walking into a room that has been well furnished. Their confidence is boosted when they talk to people because where they are giving them such a sense of security. When someone spends time picking out decorations, they are picking them out with their future guests in mind because they want the person to feel at home just as much as they do. If we did not use flowers to brighten up a room or paintings to fill the bare walls, rooms would feel disconnected from our reality. Art is how people express what they are feeling and gives the viewers of the painting new life. When you are looking at a room with white walls and a brown floor all you see is emptiness, but if you are looking at bright blue walls with trees coming to life you are seeing the open woods of Colorado. If a room didn’t have purple elephants from India or a Picasso painting hanging from the walls there would be nothing for the guest to look at. Decorations are the subtlest forms of entertainment for the human eye, and without them, the curious minds of the world would be forever dull.
