7 BIC pen artists

They say Andy Warhol and Jean Dubuffet already used ballpoint pens to pass the time while they were mulling over their next projects. Because who hasn't amused themselves with a BIC pen in the middle of a boring class, on the bus or waiting for a dentist appointment? A ballpoint pen can be the perfect antidote to boredom… but it can also be the medium for creating an artwork. Case in point, seven artists who have turned the BIC pen into the main tool of their art.

Lennie Mace

He's been considered one of the great pioneers of ballpoint pen art, to the point of being called The Ballpoint Picasso. Lennie coined the term penthings for these illustrations created exclusively with ballpoint pens. It was in the late 90s when this New Yorker, born in 1965, started using this everyday tool to make artworks that soon became a trend and ended up published in outlets like the New York Times. The eccentric Lennie went to Japan in the mid 90s… and there he stayed.

Juan Francisco Casas

The artist from Jaén is one of the reference points for this style of drawing in Spain. Active since the early years of the last decade, his artworks have become a classic within the scene. "What I do isn't that exceptional. Who hasn't killed time drawing with a pen in a notebook," Casas said in an interview with El Periódico when his name was starting to make noise. More than ten years after that dazzling arrival, his drawings of young women of a very particular sort in (more or less) everyday situations have become his personal trademark: "Yes, that's a Casas"…

Sarah Estejé

Born in Paris in 1987, the artist Sarah Estejé (also known as abadidabou) chose the blue ballpoint pen to give her work a new direction. Sarah studied art at the Institut Supérieur des Arts Appliqués in Paris and later at the Gobelins school of image. Although she has since used the ballpoint pen to depict all kinds of subjects, the Parisian artist started out with hyperrealist drawings of animals.

Enam Bosokah

Enam was working on a sculptural installation that just wasn't moving forward, so he decided to take a break. He found a ballpoint pen on the table and started doodling. Sounds familiar, right? That was the moment he realised that with such a simple, seemingly "unartistic" instrument he could let out all his creativity. He started with portraits of great African figures and his fame kept growing until he became one of the leading African artists using the pen as a creative tool.

Pablo Ariel Descalzo

"(…) I lost my job, I was handing out lots of CVs and I started drawing in the margins of the paper, experimenting with new textures and dimensions I didn't know about. Little by little I picked up technique and experimented with sheets of paper and pens (…) There are schools where they teach you to draw with India ink, nib pen, charcoal… But nowhere do they teach ballpoint technique, because it isn't considered a drawing tool as such." The Argentine artist, based in Catalonia, laid out in an interview with El Vallenc plenty of common ground with the rest of his fellow penters: "I want to show that you can make art with nothing but a ballpoint pen".

Chema Mora

Born in Yecla, Chema Mora has worked in footwear design since he was 14… and in ballpoint pen art since, about six years ago, he began drawing portraits of elderly people in a project he later called Miradazul. "If I had presented this project in another medium like watercolour, oil or nib pen, it would have been something more common and less striking (…) I usually go through about 4 or 5 pens." Still, cheaper than traditional pigments, right?

Nicolas V. Sánchez

Although this Mexican artist based in New York doesn't only use ballpoint pens, much of his success has come thanks to penthings. Nicolás V. Sánchez also goes for hyperrealism in many of his artworks but, unlike most of his colleagues, he has seen fit to bring in more colours than BIC blue in artworks that enjoy great success, as shown by his solo exhibitions and his collaborations with publications of the calibre of Vogue and Vanity Fair.