Since 2004, street artist Ben Wilson has been turning thousands of blobs of discarded gum into miniature artworks that celebrate community and the lives of local people
There have been a few times over the past 10 years or so when, feeling as grey as London skies and walking with eyes down to the pavement, I’ve spotted a hard little dazzle of primary colour and felt immediately cheered. Those little spots of intricate brightness are the work of the city’s “chewing gum artist” Ben Wilson, who, since 2004, has spent most days painting whimsical miniatures on some of the millions of flattened blobs of gum that are spat out on the city’s paving stones. Each of Wilson’s paintings is unique; most are dedicated to passersby who ask him to celebrate friendships, or to memorialise lost loves, or just to say “I live here”. I don’t know how you would measure such things, but it’s my hunch that no living artist gives more tiny moments of delight or comfort to a greater number of Londoners on a daily basis than Wilson.
I got talking to him back in 2005 and he ended up doing a painting for my young daughters. In the years that followed it was a little secret they shared with their high street, and a cause of tears one day when they discovered “their” paving stone had been pulled up and replaced. Since then, Wilson has made several thousands of these pictures; he keeps a photographic record of them and most of their dedicatees, goes back and carefully touches up those that have been scuffed or damaged. The result, for those who know where and how to look, is a kind of alternative trail of blue (and green and yellow and red) plaques, not to the famous dead but to the diversity of the living city.
