Muswell Hill Journal

Whimsical Works of Art, Found Sticking to the Sidewalk

  MUSWELL HILL, England — When first exposed to the art of Ben Wilson, or to Mr. Wilson in the act of creating it, people tend to respond with some degree of puzzlement. 

When I first saw one, I thought it was a fruit sticker,” said Matt Brasier, who was walking through this north London suburb the other day.

A woman named Vassiliki, who was passing by, said that when she came upon Mr. Wilson, prone and seemingly inert on the sidewalk, “I thought he wasn’t very well.” She added: “I was like, ‘What is he doing?’ And they told me: ‘He’s painting the chewing gum.’ ” 

That is exactly what he was doing. Mr. Wilson, 47, one of Britain’s best-known outsider artists, has for the last six years or so immersed himself in a peculiar passion all his own: he paints tiny pictures on flattened blobs of discarded chewing gum on the sidewalks of London. So familiar is he here, painting in any kind of weather, that he has become something of a local celebrity and mascot. 

“He brings a lot of joy to a lot of people,” said Peter Kyriacou, who owns the local Snappy Snaps photography store, which has a number of Wilson works out front. 

Mr. Wilson reckons he has painted many thousands of chewing gum pictures around London. Weird as the pursuit might be, the result is lovely: seemingly random spots of color amid the gray that, on closer examination, turn out to be miniature paintings of just about anything: animals, landscapes, portraits and, often, stylized messages of regret, thanks, commemoration and love. 

Pedestrians tend to crowd around when they see him at work. “People are always coming up to me asking me for pictures, for different reasons,” Mr. Wilson said. 

He obliges when he can. In Muswell Hill, where he lives and which has his largest collection of chewing gum art, his pictures have become a chronicle of the neighborhood, a representation of its residents’ whimsies, sorrows and passions. Among the pictures dotted outside the post office, for example, are an R.I.P. painting for a postman and a picture of a tiger in honor of a postal worker who is from Sri Lanka. 

To mark the closing of a Woolworth’s store a couple of years ago, Mr. Wilson crowded every employee’s name onto a piece of gum, along with a good-luck message from the managers. He painted another in which the employees thanked their customers. The two pictures are still there, even though the store is gone. 

Mr. Wilson has also become friendly with the workers in the discount general store that replaced the Woolworth’s, and he recently painted a message of love on behalf of Syed Miah, a cashier there who had had a fight with his girlfriend. 

“She thought maybe I’d stuck a sticker on the ground,” said Mr. Miah, 32. “Then I explained that I’d had an artist come and do it. It was brilliant.” 

Mr. Wilson, who grew up in a family of artists, might seem like just a local eccentric, but he has achieved much attention for his unusual art, working apart from traditional conventions and institutions. He created some of his earlier pieces — mostly enormous wood structures built in forests and fields, some commissioned, many not — in places as far away as Australia, Finland and Baltimore. Several years ago, he was an artist in residence at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa. 

Though his girlfriend’s salary from her job as a teacher’s aide helps, as does the occasional sale of his (normal-size) paintings, Mr. Wilson does most of his work for no pay, feeling, he said, that the paintings and how they relate to the community are an end in themselves. 

His current project was inspired by a variety of concerns: the scourge of chewing gum on city sidewalks, people’s carelessness about the environment and how advertisements, not art, rule the urban landscape. 

He developed a technique in which he softens the gum with a blowtorch, sprays it with lacquer and then applies three coats of acrylic enamel. He uses tiny brushes, quick-drying his work with a lighter as he goes along, and then seals it with clear lacquer. Each painting takes between a few hours and a few days, and can last several years if the conditions are right. 

The police often question him, but when he explains that he is not the one who spat the gum on the sidewalk, he said, they come around. He was arrested once and was brought to a local police station for questioning, but the charges were dropped after dozens of people wrote letters of support.

One was from John Maizels, publisher of the art magazine Raw Vision, which has featured Mr. Wilson’s work several times. “Ben Wilson is an artist with tremendous commitment and integrity,” he wrote. In another letter, Penny Northway, the children’s minister at a Muswell Hill church, described how Mr. Wilson painted a gum picture for her son, Max, after his grandfather died. 

“My respect for him grew after I noted how sensitively and patiently he dealt with Max and then translated his expressed (and slightly muddled) wishes into a pocket-sized painting,” she said in the letter. “I have found Ben to be consistently caring, always sympathetic, refreshingly humble and driven by a constant desire to please others.” 

He is hard-pressed to name his favorite gum picture, but there have been many memorable ones. One came from a young man’s request that Mr. Wilson paint a marriage proposal outside his girlfriend’s favorite store. “He took her to the shoe shop and pointed down at the chewing gum and it said, ‘Will you marry me?’ ” Mr. Wilson said. 

She said yes. Some months later, Mr. Wilson said, he ran into the couple again, along with their new baby.

***A version of this article appeared in print on June 14, 2011, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Whimsical Art, on Canvases Stuck to Sidewalk.***