Syd Carpenter:	Good evening to the Class of 2014. It's amazing to be able to say that. I'm Syd Carpenter, and I'm the Chair of the Art Department here. Just in listening to David and to President Chopp speak, I realized that we had some linkage happening in the words that we had prepared for you tonight. I wanted to deliver some of those ideas from the perspective of the artist. I have been working with obviously art students here for many, many years, and I prepared a letter to those art students. Primarily to the art majors. Tonight the fact that I'm here with 300 students who may or may not come to the art department, I feel like I have this great opportunity to share those words that I would have just focused specifically with art majors.
	As an artist, my words come from a visually located place that may or may not be familiar to you. My experience at Swarthmore tells me that there are many artists among you. More than you might expect. That includes those of you who acknowledge yourselves as artists and those of you who haven't as yet, and those could include engineer artists, linguistic artists, mathematician artists, artists who study religion, historian artists, artists of economy and sociology, artist scientists, the philosophers, the psychologists, anyone who can't help but see the family of things in sharp detail and having looked, make something of it. I know you're here.
	Much of what I say references the visual arts because that's what I do, but like my list, I'm speaking to anyone who inhabits a self-made world of observation, questions any impulse to act. It's about sustaining and amplifying that impulse that interests me most. As for myself, I won't be able to present my latest body of work to you. You'll have to go online or you can go to my gallery in Philadelphia to see if what I make has anything to say to you. Whether you think it's well-made, edgy, ambitious, subtle, relevant, because we all know when we're attracted to a thing, or if not attracted at least engaged by it. I also know too many of you have been convinced not to trust yourselves in the presence of art. 
	Peter London wrote a book on creativity called No More Secondhand Art, in which he sites a description of verbal language as, "A generic function of the human brain." Ellen Dissanayake in her book, Homo Aestheticus, makes the case that humankind is biologically hardwired to communicate visually. Whereas most people having learned to speak go on speaking, most of us stop making art of any kind, even though the urge and confidence to do so comes so easily to us when we're very, very young. There is a villain afoot somewhere in this, but how to put a finger on it, and much less put a halt to it is the question. Somewhere in the process of learning how we're supposed to be in the world, and I use that word, "supposed" to be in the world, we get disconnected from our ability to react visually, learning instead to be embarrassed by our efforts. Learning instead to feel so visually inept that we stop doing it altogether, continuing to do so only in our dreams. 
	Have you noticed how alive and well your visual lives are in your dreams? And how apparently inexhaustible our ability to make and see things while we're sleeping? I've thought about this a lot because I teach visual thinking and because I see evidence of the potential for a rich, visual life in students like yourself who mistakenly slide their artistic instincts to the back burner. Notice I said, "burner" because the instincts, although discounted, are still warm. I have an idea about how to turn up that visual heat. It has to do with what Peter London's question is about, how can you use noticing and responding to what you notice, not only just speak about the world, but also to explore the world and expand yourself. What follows is not a recommendation that everyone in here come and become artists, performing artists or literary artists. It's a recommendation however, that you be aware of your own aquifers of invention. It's a recommendation that you notice what you notice.
	The composer John Cage said one of the wisest things about our visual lives and what we do with them, and he said, and I love this, "Everyone is in the best seat." Think about that for a moment. Everyone is in the best seat. To notice what you notice is about provocation, revision and revival. It's a resource for anyone longing for good news of themselves from themselves, but you'll have to notice the signals if you're going to receive what's intended for you. How does this work? I compare our senses to the lens of a camera focusing in and out, bringing some things into view, leaving others in a blur. Some things clarified or noticed, others is ignored. It's how we get through the waking hours of the day. True enough everything we encounter is not interesting or provocative, so we pick and choose what we'll attend to. That makes sense. Unfortunately, this can add up to only seeing or noticing what we have to. Any more and we consider ourselves to be distracted but what if we decide, in addition to attending to our business so to speak, we decide to notice smaller signals. The ones flickering on and off right before our eyes, what I call the no-see 'ums of experience. There but not. Everywhere but nowhere. Somehow they stand out to you. 
	Let's say you notice that lovely swirling network of ridges and trenches in the bark of that huge oak tree you pass everyday. What do you do? Practically speaking, no action is required but you notice and by noticing you decide to do something. You do a sketch. You make a photograph. You make a rubbing, or if you're a biologist maybe the swirls remind you of the growth pattern in the shell of the glyptemys muhlenbergii, the common bog turtle, and you decide to do a comparative study of the structural graphics of expansion and growth, the results of which are applied to the design of highly stabilized shock resistant construction techniques eventually used to rebuild Port Au Prince, New Orleans, and countless villages in Chile, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indonesia, China. Anyplace destroyed or threatened by earthquake and flood. By noticing and then reacting you abandon pragmatic indifference and move towards the dicey, messy place of creativity and invention. 
	In addition to allowing you to put a check next to, "Save the world", on your To Do list, your moment of response has also delivered the much anticipated news from yourself. You are once again in touch with the uninhibited visually reactive self. A good friend of mine Martin is a painter of clouds, landscapes, and gardens. I should say "a garden" because unless he's traveling he paints only one garden, his own. He lives with Theresa on a hill overlooking the Hudson River. From their bedroom widow they can see down towards the Tappan Zee Bridge and the arc of the river passing between the Palisades Cliffs. To be at Martins house in the evening at sunset as I was just a few weeks ago on a clear day is an occasion for silence. I am easily silenced by color. Purple, pink, orange fading to green. It's a curious thing. The horizon turns green just when the sun sinks out of sight. It's something I've noticed. Maybe you have too. 
	While Martin paints, Theresa gardens, an understatement at best. Theresa studied sculpture in art school but in the last decade she's redirected a compulsion to arrange clay, wood, metal, and paper, to seeking out, growing, and arranging rare plants on the hill side above the river. Up the road and through a gate you experience their place beginning with a panoramic view of deciduous trees and conifers sheltering raspberry covered hillsides and a pond. In the middle of the pond is a little island occupied on and off by two river otters who come to feast on the frogs. Further up the hill through the trees sits the house with clean broad lines, low modestly suggesting nothing of the jaw dropping horticultural virtuosity in progress on its opposite side. Theresa's is a garden that should be preserved for posterity I think. It should be recorded and studied in every phase of the growing season. Yes, it's that good. 
	With that said, no one besides a few very close friends, sees this garden. Each year major expansions, edits, perfections to perfect the already perfected. If you think this garden can't be improved, return in a year and see what's being peaked, what's peaking, what's being added to the seamless design. No mere tweaking here. Again, the garden's not available to anyone but their friends, a few friends. There are no tours despite persistent requests. There's a total ban on fund-raising tours for the local garden clubs. There will be no awe struck garden tourists, hawk eyed garden veterans, and the dreaded cavorting photographers loading up to post on Flickr. They would be ever so grateful. Sorry. No can do. They'll be none of that. 
	So, what's all this passion about? Besides fueling Theresa's passion for all things horticultural and what amounts to a lifelong conversation with soil, water, light, and change on a hill. The garden has been created for Martin, to provide him with an endless source of serendipitous occurrences for him to notice and to paint. He is up to the task for his paintings are miracles of observation, of what he noticed about light, color, texture, and the passage of time. I think mostly the passage of time. It should also be noted that Martin, as a founder of one of the most celebrated non-profit cutting edge galleries in New York City, is not himself celebrated by the art world. He does show in small city museums and conservative commercial galleries, with his first one person show here in the List Gallery at the age of 40. Paintings of flowers and the woman who grows them do not represent an art world edge. The garden and the art inspired by it are deeply devotional, very private, but infinitely expansive exercises in creation for the sake of looking, for the sake of noticing. 
	I compare life to a fish net an truth be told many of our nets, and I'm sure you'll agree, have been strung very loosely. What appear to be inconsequential things are allowed to slip right through while the big recognizable things get snagged. Stuff like, get a job to make the most money, marry the correct person, know the correct people. You fill in the rest, but what passed through? What did we miss and would we do well to use a finer net to hold on to the unpredictable and in doing so get closer to our own personal genius?
	Now I'm going to do a little side step here and talk about that word, genius. In a place like Swarthmore we expect much of ourselves, and why not? We've succeeded on multiple levels or we wouldn't be here. We could say we've achieved a kind of unspoken anointed identity whether we choose to acknowledge it to be so or not. We've been anointed to lead, to create, discover, enable, explain, to question. We are here. It is our good fortune to have been invited to a sit down intellectual buffet with all the trimmings but maybe there's a little voice asking if you having been invited here was a mistake, and worse still, when will we be found out? I would offer up what Elizabeth Gilbert, the writer responsible for Eat, Love, Pray finds to be a rational, although, unconventional way to deal with these unrealistic needs to be a high flyer at all times. She helps us to understand our work as an uneven landscape that can deliver us to soaring peaks or bottomless crevasses to be bridged or to be pitched in, never to be seen or heard from again. You know it goes that way sometimes. 
	Elizabeth appears on the online lecture series Ted Talks discussing creativity and the potential curse of having produced a book that is now considered her masterpiece. The fear of course is that the second book won't be as successful as the first. She'll be seen as a one trick pony, flash in the pan, mayday mayday, lights out. The problem being that once you've demonstrated extraordinary capacity you have no other course than to do so again and again. Your ascendancy should be ongoing, forward, perpetual, a never ending uninterrupted advance towards increasingly grand demonstrations of power and brilliance. 
	To put this notion of genius in its place, Gilbert referred to the original definition of the word genius as provided by 5th century Greeks and later the Romans. They believed a genius to be a separate entity distinct from us, an energy or intervention that may or may not visit us with any regularity. The genius came out of the walls of wherever to assist and shape the outcome of the work, thus creating a distance that protected artists from the results of the work. The artist was therefore protected from narcism. Bad work was not entirely the artists fault but the fault of a bad genius. The Renaissance changed everything by putting the individual at the center. From then on individuals were referred to as being a genius rather than having a genius. Big mistake. Too much responsibility. Warped egos. Unmanageable expectations about performance. The resulting pressures has been killing off creative people for the last 500 years. Gilbert wants to know, is that okay with us? Wouldn't it be preferable for creative, inventive people want to live rather than to sink in despair over a genius. 
	She tells the story of Tom Waits, the quintessential tormented contemporary artists driving down an LA freeway. He hears a fragment of melody coming, having no paper, no piano or guitar, he realizes he's going to lose this melody but he decides not to panic. Looking at the sky he says, "Excuse me. Can you not see I'm driving? Do I look like I can write down a song? Go bother someone else. If you want to exist, come back at an opportune time when I can take care of you." She also tells the story of poet Ruth Stone who describes the story of hearing a poem coming towards her like a train. At a distance from her house, she begins to run, all the while being chased by the poem, but it's too late and the poem passes right through her. She missed it and it would continue on looking for another poet. Sometimes when this happens she would catch the poem by it's tail and pull it back, pencil in one had, the tail of the poem in another, pulling it back into her body. This way the poem would come up perfectly on the paper but backwards from the last word to the first. 
	You're not guaranteed that your work will always be your best all the time. It's just not going to happen, but rather than suffering remind yourself what Gilbert says to her genius, "Listen thing, it's not my fault. I'm putting everything into this. Let the record reflect that I showed up for my part of the job and that's even if the genius does not." What's your part of the job? I would say it is to notice what you notice. React to it. Pursue it. If genius comes, you are fortunate indeed. If not, you're at least doing your chosen work fearlessly. 
	Now I'm going to do a little bit of noticing here. We're in Swarthmore college amphitheater designed my Philadelphia landscape architect Thomas Sears in 1942. This is a place to notice, even in this dim light. What I've noticed about our amphitheater is that to enter here, no matter how often or at what time of day or year, is to be enveloped by a sense of sanctuary. Did you feel that when you came in here? Is it telling that Swarthmore college in 1942 would, in the midst of a world war, undertake the development of such a place. This makes the point that architecture is a potent signifier of the spirit of a location, it's occupants, and can never be neutral. Spaces we inhabit absorb and provoke us, dispensing tonic or toxin. Mediating our state of mind overtly or through subtlety. I attribute great power to shapes, mass, light, and space; the basic vocabulary of architecture. 
	I find them in everything I notice or observe and even if you don't identify as an artist, take note when you're being influenced by these, as you surely must have been when you first entered this place, because these are subtle, powerful things that nudge at your state of mind. The width and depth of the stair. The proportion and positioning of these trees. The density and placement of smaller trees and shrubs separating us from the less tranquil spaces beyond. A gradual decent or ascent vising us to move slowly, to soften our breath and our voices, to notice air, light, and space. Stone built terraces curve away from and towards you, an extravagant sweeping geometry punctuated by columns of tulip trees. This is a really really good place to exhale and relieve the spirit if you care to notice. 
	So far I've been talking about noticing things that take close looking and sensitive antenna but there's more to noticing. Allow your view to focus on it. It. What? What it? It. That expanse of creased rubbery hide hanging loose on a mountainous inhaling, exhaling frame attached to the swaying head and proboscis of a pachyderm. It being a frequently attending, uninvited, often unnoticed elephant in the room. Elephants in the room represent the unnoticed or deliberately ignored. Unnoticed or ignored because if we chose to acknowledge them we may have to do something. What about these elephants? Obvious, neglected, unattended, unnoticed. The categories are limitless and I know all of us could list issues and concerns silently but urgently petitioning our attention. Of course our priorities didn't place them high on the to do list, if they placed them there at all. We could recall that fishnet metaphor here. Anton Chekov, he says, "I have the feeling that I've seen everything but failed to notice the elephants." 
	I would encourage you to notice and announce the presence of elephants. In doing so, you keep a path open to yourself and you advocate for sensitivity, civility, and integrity for us all. Your lens moves in. Your lens moves out. The only assurance we have at success is to practice what we care about. It would be wise to accept the uncertainty of it all. As Elizabeth Gilbert suggests, "Maybe your gifts are not from you but something on loan to you from an unimaginable source passed along, and when you're finished, to somebody else. Show up. Be present so when the brilliant idea arrives you'll be ready. You'll notice what you notice. Finally, a thought from the poet Mary Oliver Wylde Guise. "You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for 100 miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about your despairs. Yours. And I will tell you mine. Meanwhile, the sun and the other clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile, the wild geese high in the clean blue air are headed home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese. Harsh and exciting in the family of things."