Showerpress

Ben Wilson paints 2cm icons on pavements, using chewing gum as his canvass.

“I’m just going to keep going and see how far I get,” said Mr Wilson, who started his quest at the Hadley end of High Street, Barnet. “I use acrylic paint and varnish, then I’ve got a little burner to dry it. I’ve done different pictures: cups of tea, elephants, flowers. I do requests as well. Often I just draw whatever takes me on that day.”

[..]

“I’m not defacing the pavement, it is more sensitive than that. I don’t want to get in people’s faces I’m not a graffiti artist. You get so many reactions from people, their reactions are so different, but rarely are they negative.”
www.thisislocallondon.co.uk/news/topstories/556654.painting_a_gum_trail/

Jimmy O’Neill from Wigan happened to have his camera when he spotted the colourfully spotted pavements:

“I observed these blobs changing colour from white when it rained to sticky black almost moving blobs in the summer time”. But the work speaks best for itself. The following documentary was shot by University of Leeds student Mariel Kaplan:

A couple of photographers have compiled sets on Flickr, documenting some of Ben’s creations:

www.flickr.com/photos/stefz/sets/72157594196035794/
www.flickr.com/photos/rahid1/sets/286517/

Ben gets a kick out of being able to paint the streets free from criminal prosecution. Policemen peer disapprovingly over his shoulder in some Youtube videos, and he was probably picked up as ‘feel good’ end pieces in the mainstream media. But Ben takes his job seriously.

“I love people. It’s just a way of…um. We’re so… – It’s just sad in many ways, the times that we live in. I like to do something positive. [...]This one’s taken about 3 hours. If it’s a complex one it could take all day, 2 days, 3 days…”

Tim Adams writes eloquently about Ben in The Observer, but unless you’re particularly interested in the history of gum skip down to the paragraph beginning “John Carey, Merton professor of English at Oxford…”