Patterns in the Hallway

The carpet in a hospital does something interesting under mixed light. I was there most of the week, off and on, waiting and watching and doing what I always do when I find myself in an unfamiliar space: shooting patterns. Floor tile. Wall texture. The geometric repeat of a ventilation grate near the ceiling. A corridor where the light hit the surface at just the right angle to make the grid pop. I have done this for years, everywhere I go. My eye goes to repetition, to structure, to the quiet design work no one is looking at. Hospital waiting rooms are actually excellent for this

Mom is 89. She broke her femur in December, right at the top of her prosthetic knee, which meant the surgery initially inserted a rod in the femur and involved lots of screw. It didnt heal...at all. Four months later the new surgery would replace both at once, a long femoral rod extending up into the thigh, no bone growth required, no screws. Clean solution to an ugly problem. But it required general anesthetic for an 89-year-old, which required a stress test first, which she failed on Monday. A heart catheterization was scheduled for Friday morning, and if she was cleared, we’d proceed. If not, back to the beginning.

 
The week arranged itself around that uncertainty.

 
I also photographed the art on the walls, as I do wherever I go. Not to copy it, but to let it rattle around in my head for a while, to see what it might suggest. Hospitals actually invest in their art sometimes, and this place had orchids, real ones, live orchids, a company that provides and maintains them throughout the building. I kept coming back to them. Real beauty in a place built around the management of fear. You have to respect that.

Hospital Orchids. Shot on iphone. Background, "curtain" and softness added with Photoshop and Corel painter.

Somewhere in the middle of all that, Austin Kleon’s newsletter arrived. He’s the author of Steal Like an Artist and a few other essential books about creative life, and every week he shares ten things worth seeing. I’ve been a free subscriber for years, and I think I have read everything he’s written. This week he introduced me to a newsletter called Inconspicuous Consumption, by a writer named Paul Lukas, and specifically to an article about security envelopes.

 
Security envelopes. The ones with the patterned lining inside a bank statement or a utility bill, the zigzag or hatched or kaleidoscopic interior that makes the contents unreadable when held to the light. I clicked in with mild curiosity and stayed for a long time.

 
There is a whole world here. The patterns, called security tints, have a genuine history rooted in printing technology, banking, and the visual problem of hiding information in plain sight. There are collectors. There is a Flickr album with hundreds of them, documented with the devoted attention that serious collectors bring to anything. And looking at them one after another, they are genuinely beautiful: small repeated geometries, the way different patterns create entirely different rhythmic effects, the strange overlap between utility and design.

 
Then there are the artists.

 
Amber Williams, based in Rock Island, makes collages with security envelope patterns that stop you. A California artist named Cindy Bernard created photo-grid installations from security tints in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Elizabeth Duffy, out of Rhode Island, has built entire rooms and apartments furnished with security-pattern wallpaper and upholstery, quilts, sculptures she calls security envelope icebergs. It is a vein of material that somebody looked at and thought: there is something here worth following. Whoda thunk?

 
Paul Lukas ended his piece by inviting readers to try designing their own security patterns. I thought: why not?

Screaming. Op Art piece I created in 2017. If you enlarge this you will see the illusory motion effect, a scream face in each of the small football shapes, and the background is the 1893 Expressionist painting by Edvard Munch, The Scream.

I should be honest that I’m not starting from zero. A few years ago I built something I’d loosely describe as an op art piece using security envelope logic. The specific illusion called illusory motion, where static images appear to move because of how the eye processes contrast, alignment, and peripheral vision. The method is straightforward in principle: three values, black, white, and a midtone grey, arranged in a repeating pattern and then rotated by a consistent increment each pass, somewhere around 16.5 degrees if memory serves. The result does what the best op art does, it appears to move without moving. There is a shimmer at the edge of perception, something caught between stillness and motion. I’m not certain I still have the original file. It may have wandered off to wherever original files go. But the image exists, and seeing these security envelope collections brought it back immediately.

 
The patterns I was shooting in the hospital kept reminding me of it. There is a psychological term for this, the frequency illusion, sometimes called the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon: the way a thing you’ve just learned to see suddenly appears everywhere, in every direction, as though the world rearranged itself overnight. It didn’t. Your perception just opened a new door. The hospital carpet and the security envelope lining and the orchid petal structure and the op art piece on the studio wall are all drawing from the same deep visual vocabulary. The eye that finds one can find all of them.

 
On Friday, Mom had the heart cath at eleven in the morning. She was cleared. We left our community at six, got to Omaha around ten-thirty, to the hotel by eleven, surgery at six the next morning. She was released Saturday at twelve-thirty, and we made it to Elise’s bridal shower, barely, and we were glad we did.

 
The drive home came last. After all of it, the stress tests and the surgeries and the shower and the handshakes and the relief, we pointed the car west into a serious storm. Tornado warnings. It was cool though as I had the pleasure of seeing a small tornado touch down in a field as I drove, more of a really big dust devil really. All that while the colossal low hanging, very angry clouds rotated above us. And then the deluge. Rain so heavy the windshield turned into a moving watercolor. Cant see. Cant pullover for fear of getting run over from behind. Ugh. A fitting end to a week that had asked a great deal of everyone in it.
She did great. All of it, start to finish, she did great.

Patterns on the ceiling at night. Captured with an iphone, edited with lightroom.

The rabbit hole is still open. The op art security pattern, the hospital wall art still bouncing around in my ideation folder, the orchids. In the middle of a week that required a lot of sitting still and waiting, a rabbit hole appeared the way they always do: sideways, through a newsletter, through a link, through the accumulated force of someone else’s curiosity landing at exactly the right moment.

 
I followed it. I always do.

 
P.S. — If you've been curious about Unhurried Letters, the first envelope ships April 28th. It's a travel story from my journal (this one from when I went to Faro, Portugal), a limited edition fine art print, and a recipe card, and one of my postcards I made from the area i traveled to, all arriving in your mailbox once a month. Founders pricing is $15/month for the first 100 subscribers. If that sounds like your kind of thing: click here -> Unhurried Letters 

Patterns in the Hospital waiting room captured with iphone, edited in lightroom on site.