Swarthmore’s campus feels like a living museum. Every tree has a small sign with its Latin name, every shrub seems to be curated carefully with love. In spring, the Rose Garden overflows with blossoms so bright they make the hard days feel a little lighter. And the trees of the Crum Woods welcome every season as it comes, bursting with green leaves in spring, standing quiet and bare in winter. There is no rush, no resistance. I began to see that there’s also beauty in the way things change, in the way they stay present through it all.
All of this inspired my final art project: a pair of paintings showing a lily in two states. One canvas is luminous, the pink petals opening towards sunlight. The other, drawn in soft charcoal, shows the same flower folding inward, dissolving into darkness. I wanted to capture how both moments, blooming and fading, are part of one entity. How those spaces in between, the quiet moments, hold their own kind of beauty.
I first learned about negative space in my Painting I class. My professor taught us to start by sketching the shapes around an object before drawing the object itself, outlining the “empty” areas that usually go unnoticed. At first, it felt a little uncomfortable, but over time, it became a new way of looking at objects and eventually, moments . I started to understand that the spaces between things can define the whole picture.
This mindset has been the biggest gift Swarthmore has given me: finding beauty and comfort in places I never thought to look. Not in the obvious milestones, but in the negative space — the quiet, ordinary moments that stitch a year together. I’ve seen it in the moments of silence that fill the amphitheater during First Collection. I’ve felt it in late-night study sessions at McCabe Library, when your friend pushes a cup of coffee across the table without saying a word, just knowing you need it. I’ve noticed it in spontaneous bursts of laughter on Parrish Beach, in the way people leave handwritten notes on each other’s doors before a big exam, or just the simple joy of walking back to your dorm with that friend who feels like home.
When I look at my paired lily paintings now, I see a cycle: a bloom, a fade, and the very promise of new beginnings. I see a reminder that nothing is truly static, not the seasons, not a canvas, not a community, not a person. Everything moves, everything changes, and in that motion there is always something worth seeing, and something worth holding close, even if just for a moment.
