Pencil Artist of the Week: Wim Heldens

Okay, so this one isn’t so much a pencil drawing, as it is a painting of a model holding a pencil. But you like pencils well enough to forgive that, right?

We read over at Pencil Points the other day about this portrait, by Wim Heldens. Heldens, who lives in Amsterdam, is self-taught. He says of this piece,

“I paint from intuition, always trying to paint that what touches me deepest, but being a painter who is more of a doer than a thinker, it is very hard for me to explain what I try to capture. As Edward Hopper says: ‘If you could say it in words, there would be no more reason to paint’…..I paint what I ‘feel’ with my eyes and maybe it is for other people then to tell what I have captured”

His model, a student named Jeroen, is holding a beautiful bright blue pencil. Black Sal at Pencil Points says, “It’s a splendid portrait… but what’s that pencil he’s holding? I have been to the NPG to see the painting first hand, and there is no visible brand name painted. The pencil is hexagonal with alternate dark and light blue faces. This is the best quality image I could find on the web. Any ideas?”

The only thing we can think of is a Mars Lumograph pencil, but the ferrule/eraser combo doesn’t seem to be consistent with that.