Name: Why She Drew 10-Foot Masterpieces With a Pen
Uploaded: 2025-06-17T15:23:42.000Z
Duration: 5 min 15 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Massive in size, but intimate in feeling.

Her name is Jacqueline Suwari, and she's a master of her craft.

They don't call me the queen of the ballpoint pen for nothing.

I'm a multidisciplinary artist specializing with the ballpoint pen based in Abuja, Nigeria.

I do one of the largest ballpoint pen pieces in the world.

When I went into art school, I was told that the pen wasn't an art material.

When I left art school, I was a little lost because I had now trained in painting, and there's nothing like those kind of strokes that I got with the ballpoint pen in painting.

There was a drawing exhibition for draftswomen.

I was like, let me just do a ballpoint pen drawing just in case.

It was the beautiful way the pen reflected the skin.

There was these layers of her skin, the way the pen was able to create those soft but subtle flows of her skin.

So I decided that, you know what, I'm going to explore his ballpoint pen and see how far it would take me.

Once I've gotten my reference, I will do the transfer with pencil onto the paper.

Once that's done, I proceed to draw with the ballpoint pen.

It takes me between four weeks to about two months to finish.

I would say close to a million strokes per figure.

Sometimes the sound of my drawing is very soothing for me.

For a typical piece, the amount of pens I go through will be about five to ten.

If there's hair and it happens to be like complicated hair, maybe like Afro hair, it would be like 15 or 20 because just hair alone can take up to six pens.

When I was making Nowhere Myself, I was talking about embodying your true self.

I expressed myself in films, sculpture, poetry, paintings, dance even.

I didn't know what to expect from the audience.

I just knew that I wanted to encourage people to be their most authentic self.

And then it was happening, you know, in a way that I didn't when we had just started recovering from the Ansar's protest and people were being targeted because of the way they appeared.

I believe that the true authenticity of a person comes from within.

Irrespective of whatever society says about you, still aim for authenticity of the self.

It was kind of humbling that people were able to grasp that.

It was so profound in the sense that people actually were making life choices from experiencing that exhibition.

But even if I didn't sell, for me that was success in itself because people were able to view my work and live that place differently.

People send me messages and they say they want me to mentor them.

I don't have to physically be present with you to mentor you as we have about five to six people from different parts of Nigeria and we meet on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

Akin, I know that before we started this exercise you were very afraid but this what you've done is very impressive.

You've come a long way considering where you used to be before.

It shows that you're paying attention and I'm actually very impressed.

When I began my art journey, all I just wanted to do was to draw.

I didn't think about influence or interventions or any of that sort or exhibition around the world.

If the love for just one ballpoint pen that I found in secondary school, pursuing that love has brought me this far, there's nothing that's impossible at this point.

Ballpoint pen can never be the same again without that addition that I have brought because from that move alone more people are inspired to do larger pieces.

I've made it my life's work to make sure that my work is actually studied in school to know that this artist took art a step further from what we know as art.

She took the ballpoint pen and the appreciation of it a step further from just the studio to people's personal lives.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Why She Drew 10-Foot Masterpieces With a Pen

authentic

massive

subtle

present