Ben Wilson (English artist)

Ben Wilson: The Chewing Gum Artist: The Millennium Bridge Gum Trail is a crowdfunded book on Wilson and his art, due to be published in November 2019.

Wilson has also secretly placed small black-and-white painted tiles at 300–400 London tube stations, dated and numbered as part of a newer guerilla project, first written about in 2018.

Wilson's work has been featured by the BBC, MyMuswell This Is Local London, Raw Vision, The Daily Telegraph, The New York Times and in non-anglophone countries, such as Switzerland, Germany and Serbia. Two short documentary films have also been made about Wilson, Ben Wilson, The Chewing Gum Man and In My Blood. In 2015, Ben Wilson was also featured in the Erjia Guan show.

People crowd around Wilson when he works and he has been praised by passersby. He has become a local celebrity as his work has chronicled the changes in the neighborhood. He has a large book where he keeps backlogged requests for paintings, such as births and deaths, marriages or some other personal commemoration. He does not charge for gum painting requests, a word he prefers to use over "commissions". When he was arrested in 2009 by the City of London Police on suspicion of criminal damage, the case was dropped after dozens of people wrote letters of support a few months later. The Barnet police also came to his support, filing a witness statement on his behalf.

Britain spends £150 million annually cleaning chewing gum from pavement. Wilson was arrested in 2005 in Trafalgar Square and once in 2009. However, he says that "technically, it is not criminal damage, because you are painting the gum, not the pavement." Wilson does not consider himself to be a graffiti artist, but has come to know graffiti writers through his work.

Wilson started experimenting with occasional chewing-gum paintings in 1998, and in October 2004 began working on them full-time. He has created more than 10,000 of these works on pavements all over the UK and parts of Europe, although most of his work is found in Muswell Hill.

Ben Wilson (born 1963) is an English wood carver and outsider artist. The son of an artist, Wilson grew up in a creative environment and attended art school. His distaste for industrial waste, cars and rubbish eventually turned into an art form. He creates tiny works of art by painting chewing gum stuck to the pavement. Initially, his work garnered him unwanted attention from the authorities, but because he is not defacing private property but merely painting rubbish, he was found to be breaking no law. In addition to the chewing gum art, Wilson paints and sculpts. He has exhibited his paintings and sculptures in England, the United States, Germany, Ireland, Finland, France and Serbia.