Suitcase Filled with Nails Quotes

“Still, I put one shoe in front of the other to outpace real and imagined mental and physical obstacles until I cross that finish line.”
― Yvonne Wakefield, Suitcase Filled with Nails

“One of the chairs in particular is unsettling to them. Made to look like an electric chair, it has leather straps and chains and wires hooked to a car battery. A dead rose wilts on the seat. The artist says the chair isn’t about physical death but about “how lying to each other kills beauty.” One chair is covered in bling, another in barbed wire and sculpted burnt and screaming faces. Two chairs are concealed in boxes. Another has a hole cut into the seat and a potted plant growing up from beneath. One chair is outfitted with fishbowls filled with live fish. Reassembled and painted to look like a black widow spider, one chair hangs from the wall.”
― Yvonne Wakefield, Suitcase Filled with Nails

“The next big project, Chair as Self-portrait, develops around another muchboose lunch. Club members hatch the idea: “If I were a chair, how would I want to be seen in society, and how would I want society to see me?”
― Yvonne Wakefield, Suitcase Filled with Nails

“I think of them as firefly friends. They light up my life for a moment and then fly on; most likely I will never see them again.”
― Yvonne Wakefield, Suitcase Filled with Nails

“The research will involve quantifying responses to a series of drawing tasks. All participants in the study will be female, roughly between the ages of twenty and twenty-two. In 1990, at the time of the war, they would have been between four and six years old. I will use Piaget’s model of the preoperational stage of childhood development to limit the study’s grouping parameters. From Utrecht in Chicago, I bought enough art supplies to quantify their qualitative responses. Each participant must complete the same tasks: First, mix a color that represents how she remembers the invasion as a child. Second, draw her first memory of the invasion. Third, draw the objects around her during the invasion. The study will use projective drawing tasks to elicit and examine the nonverbal mental schema of the subjects, all of whom lived in Kuwait throughout the invasion and eventual liberation. The results will be measured for repetition of color, image, and symbol (CIS). I hope to find the answer to these questions from these young adults: Can childhood memories of the 1990 invasion be more accurately recalled using nonverbal, rather than verbal, communication skills? If so, do the recollections contain patterns of color, imagery, and symbols?”
― Yvonne Wakefield, Suitcase Filled with Nails

“With their canvas papers divided into quarters, every student but one begins filling her squares from right to left, the direction in which they read Arabic. Even their brush strokes move from right to left, the direction in which they also write Arabic.”
― Yvonne Wakefield, Suitcase Filled with Nails

“If they can see it done before their own eyes, the students feel more confident to use their own eyes.”
― Yvonne Wakefield, Suitcase Filled with Nails

“Frida Kahlo once told her class of painting students that there is not one single teacher in the world capable of teaching art. The truth in these words comes to mind in every art class I teach. I believe you can teach technique and theory, but it is up to the individual to do the art part. For the student, this means giving yourself permission to work your way, whatever way that is. Once you accept that permission, you can incorporate foundation skills. This is no longer the Renaissance, and artists are no longer judged (or compensated) solely for realism and representation. There was a time when painting and drawing, coiling a clay pot, or fashioning a bucket to draw water from a well was part of daily life. Now we peck at keyboards, buy Tupperware, and drink from plastic bottles. By not using our hands, we lose our senses. I see this in my students. Proficient on the computer, they click out sophisticated graphics. But they are baffled by and fumble with a brush, frustrated at the time it takes to manually create what they can Photoshop in a flash. I’ve taught art for a quarter of a century and rely on sound lesson plans and discipline as well as creative freedom. Still, during each drawing, painting, and ceramic class I teach, I remind myself how I felt when I scratched out my first drawings, brushed paint on a surface, or learned to center porcelain on a wheel—how it felt to tame and be liberated by the media. And, how it felt to become discouraged by an instructor’s insistence on controlling a pencil, paintbrush, or lump of clay her or his way. For most of my Kuwaiti students, a class taken with me will be their first and last studio arts class. I work at creating a learning environment both structured and free, one that cultivates an atmosphere where one learns to give herself permission to see.”
― Yvonne Wakefield, Suitcase Filled with Nails

“Frida Kahlo once told her class of painting students that there is not one single teacher in the world capable of teaching art. The truth in these words comes to mind in every art class I teach. I believe you can teach technique and theory, but it is up to the individual to do the art part. For the student, this means giving yourself permission to work your way, whatever way that is. Once you accept that permission, you can incorporate foundation skills. This is no longer the Renaissance, and artists are no longer judged (or compensated) solely for realism and representation. There was a time when painting and drawing, coiling a clay pot, or fashioning a bucket to draw water from a well was part of daily life. Now we peck at keyboards, buy Tupperware, and drink from plastic bottles. By not using our hands, we lose our senses.”
― Yvonne Wakefield, Suitcase Filled with Nails

“Their questions, their interpretations of a piece of art, help me get a little more of a glimpse into the minds and hearts of the young women with whom I’m working.”
― Yvonne Wakefield, Suitcase Filled with Nails

“Start with what’s in your gut, feel something for what you see. Then you go to the ropes, begin study in earnest, methodically introducing foundation or academic drawing techniques while honoring the emotions that drove you to the drawing board in the first place. This is how I approach drawing, how I teach drawing.”
― Yvonne Wakefield, Suitcase Filled with Nails

“I use the KW Chart as an ice breaker exercise. The K stands for what you know. The W stands for what you want to know. On separate Post- it notes, students are asked to write three things they know about art and three things they want to know about art. They then paste them under the appropriate headings written on the white board.”
― Yvonne Wakefield, Suitcase Filled with Nails

“Tacked onto each girl’s name is the name of her father and her father’s father, and the family or tribal name, so Hessa becomes Hessa Salem Farhan Al-Nasser.”
― Yvonne Wakefield, Suitcase Filled with Nails

“Inshalla is an Arabic word that means, “If God is willing,” or, “God willing.” Inshalla ends every sentence. For example: “When will you return my passport?” Answer: “Tomorrow, Inshalla.”
― Yvonne Wakefield, Suitcase Filled with Nails

“every man is dressed in dishdasha, a white robe, and long white headscarf, called ghutra, and anchored by a black rope, called agal. Women, by contrast, wear black robes, called abayas, and scarves on their heads, called hijabs, or all-encompassing face veils, called nigabs.”
― Yvonne Wakefield, Suitcase Filled with Nails