I've noticed a hard little dazzle of primary color a few times in the last ten years or so when I've been feeling as grey as London skies and walking with my eyes down to the pavement and felt instantly cheered. Ben Wilson, the city's "chewing gum artist," has spent most days since 2004 creating amusing miniatures on some of the millions of flattened blobs of gum that are spit up on the city's pavement stones.

Wilson's paintings are all one-of-a-kind; the majority are dedicated to passers-by who ask him to commemorate lost loves, celebrate friendships, or simply say "I live here." I'm not sure how such things are measured, but Wilson, in my opinion, provides more little moments of joy or consolation to a bigger number of Londoners on a daily basis than any other living artist.

I met him in 2005 and he ended up drawing a portrait for my two little girls. It was a little secret they shared with their high street throughout the years that followed, and it was a source of sorrow one day when they learned "their" paving stone had been torn up and replaced.

Wilson has created hundreds of similar photographs since then; he maintains a photographic record of them, as well as the majority of their dedicatees, and goes back to patch up any that have been scuffed or damaged. For those who know where to look, the result is a type of alternate path of blue (and green, yellow, and red) plaques commemorating the variety of the alive city, rather than the renowned dead.

You could catch Wilson in the act of creating his work if you're fortunate. He has regular haunts, including the Edwardian streets near his home in Muswell Hill and Crouch End, favorite corners of the older city in Shoreditch and Hackney, and the Millennium Bridge, where he has done a series of trails of hundreds of chewing gum paintings that have ended with covert artistic invasions of Tate Modern's Turbine Hall.

Wilson, now 58, was restoring some photos outside the Everyman theatre in Muswell Hill when I ran into him one morning last week. He was a tall guy with an uncontrollable smile, dressed in bright orange industrial overalls with layers of paint and laying flat down on the street on a piece of thick matting that he carried coiled up in a knapsack with his toolbox of equipment.

The method is quite exact. He uses a blowtorch to soften the oval of flattened gum, then sprays it with lacquer before applying three coats of acrylic enamel, generally to a design from his most recent book of requests from individuals who stop, squat, and speak.

He paints using little modellers' brushes, quickly drying his work with a lighter flame as he works, and then sealing it with lacquer. Each painting takes just a few hours to complete and may endure for years.

The more Wilson describes his bizarre everyday creations, the more sense they make. He is vehemently concerned in the endangered concept of public space. He is neither painting public property or commercially held real estate when he paints gum, as he has proven in the courts.

His paintings are intended to form a stepping-stone mosaic of common land that spans the metropolis. Gum, he claims, is the ultimate consumer product: it has no nutritional value, it doesn't biodegrade, and removing it is a time-consuming and expensive full-time job. "There's some symbolism in turning something thoughtlessly spit out into something meaningful," says the narrator.

Wilson is also interested in enthusiastically modeling a sense of close local connection and communal celebration. He's cleaning and touching up a painting outside the Everyman that depicts a murmuration of starlings over Brighton Pier in minute detail. He admits, "I've always felt bad about this one." "It was on my to-do list, but the man who had requested it passed away before I could complete it."

I happened to run across his son at a nearby café, and he asked if I could perform it in memory of his father, who loved those murmurations, so at least that was possible. And he adores the image."

He painstakingly cleans it, putting a touch of paint to the edge where it has been damaged. He then goes over some of the others along the adjoining kerbsides with me. "This is for Ivan, a man I see around here – he wanted Ivan the Terrible, so I gave it to him."

We cross the street to a row of stores. Outside the local Ryman, he cleans off a painting and reads the inscription: "This is for Nadia, who worked here." A tiger has been erected outside the post office in honor of a Sri Lankan postal worker.

Wilson managed to put every redundant employee's name on a stick of gum as a lasting remembrance when the Woolworths closed a few years ago.

He is regularly stopped by folks for whom he has painted while we are walking. Rose, the Big Issue vendor outside Sainsbury's, is a long-time acquaintance. "Rose and I have a good working relationship," he adds. "She watches my stuff while I go to the bathroom, and I watch hers." Wilson is greeted with a big grin by Ahmed Garrad, a painter and decorator.

He tells me about how Ben painted a portrait for him in 2014, when he came to Britain from Syria amid the civil war. He and his three children had British passports, but it took him nearly three years to bring them and his wife over to join him after battling with the Home Office. Wilson had painted the Syrian flag, the Free Syrian Army's emblems, and his children's names on him.

Garrad believes it was a great small symbol of optimism for him amid his legal challenges, and he was able to display it to his family when they came. Wilson says, repairing a photo of a pigeon, "The longer I lie here, all sorts of situations will unfold." Over his shoulder, a rough guy looks at him.

"They'd cut your hands off in Singapore if you did that," he adds. Wilson whispers, "I don't think they would." Wilson painted a picture for her daughter when she was not much older than the baby, says a lady pushing her granddaughter in a stroller. She tells him, "You make Muswell Hill."

He worked when he could throughout lockdown; he got Covid early on and later donated blood for antibody therapies. He'd been asked to produce a series of gum paintings along the Parkland Walk, a thin strip of forest that was previously a railway line running through north London, and despite a guarantee of municipal financing falling through, he went ahead and completed it.

We go around a stretch of the park, and he shows me some of the paintings that can be tracked using a geolocation map: a rescue dog named Peggy, a ghost station from the ancient railway, and a jogger in a light glade, each with a little inscription. "If people feel isolated, as they have so often in the last year," Wilson adds, "a painting gives them a point of reference." "It says, 'This is your surroundings.'" Anything is possible once you have the notion."

Wilson lives in a rambling Victorian villa's ground-floor apartment, with an ancient Pashley cycle in the hallway and his work — paintings, painted tiles, and pictures – heaped high on every conceivable table and surface and packed against every wall. Outside in the back garden, massive wooden sculptures emerge from the undergrowth; the tallest, which Wilson created out of scrap timber as a kind of goddess spirit of place, stands 15 feet tall.

Wilson has kept a shelf of tattered notebooks in one corner of a small sitting room where he has written down gum photo requests throughout the years like a shorthand births, deaths, and weddings column. He seems to be on the edge of tears as he thumbs through them.

He adds, "I've had to deal with people who are memorializing people who have been murdered." “People who have been lonely, or who remember favorite pets; people who are poor in various ways. It ranges from ‘Will you marry me?' proposal photos to individuals I drew as children who now have their own children.”

He enjoys how everyone has a mental image of what they want: "Some want cheese and crackers, while others want nicknames." Statues from Easter Island Breakfast in England..."

Henry Mayhew's Victorian encyclopedia of people on the margins of society, London Labour and the London Poor, is an inspiration if he has one. "I came across the original three volumes of it in a charity shop in Archway right at the beginning of doing the pictures," he explains. "I took it as a sign to keep going."

People who see him lying in the street sometimes think he's drunk and pass out; ambulances have come to a halt beside him. He's been falsely arrested on many occasions. The manner of his arrest in 2010, while working on the Millennium Bridge, has left him traumatized.

"I was doing a picture of St Paul's for some excited school kids," he explains. "When the cops arrived and attempted to arrest me for criminal damage, I simply asked if I could finish the picture." They dragged me down the bridge by my feet, put me in a cage, and forcibly collected my DNA."

With the aid of letters from friends, Wilson won his case at the City of London magistrates court. One came from John Maizels, the publisher of the art journal Raw Vision, which has often highlighted Wilson's work. Maizels commented, "Ben Wilson is an artist with tremendous commitment and integrity."

Meanwhile, Penny Northway, the children's pastor at a Muswell Hill church, described how Wilson produced a gum painting for her son, Max, as a memorial to his grandpa. "After seeing how sensitively and patiently he dealt with Max and translated his (slightly muddled) wishes into a pocket-sized painting," she remarked, "my respect for him grew."

Wilson now takes a letter from his local police department detailing his job with him when he works on the bridge. He's completed two paths on both sides of the bridge (the first was painstakingly removed by teams of cleaners). "Tate Modern is pretty much the only institution I've worked outside where no one has brought me out a cup of tea and had a chat," he adds.

When he finished a trail, he Blu-Tacked a concealed series of gum photos within the gallery and invited people to the "opening." "I met a curator and invited her to come with me, but she just laughed and said, 'I know who you are!'" "Actually, you don't really," Wilson reasoned.

He's been labeled as an environmental artist and an outsider artist throughout the years, but he despises labels. That spirit began at a young age. He was raised in "the spirit of dadaism" in Barnet, he claims. His father was a ceramicist who was a part of Jeff Nuttall's radical 1960s group People Show and created experimental theatre.

His mother was an artist who met Salvador Dal for tea once. "I've been working with clay since I was about two years old," he explains. "I recall being thrown out of my junior high pottery class when I was about 11 years old for doing it incorrectly."

He had never considered that possibility previously. Art and English instructors at his comprehensive school rescued him; he was given a spot to study art at Goldsmiths but chose to pursue his own path.

His art originally came to public prominence in the mid-1980s, when he covertly created a series of wood sculptures in Hadley Wood, near where he grew up, including a massive sleeping giant. The wood originated from a beech tree struck by lightning, which also brought down two hornbeams.

Wilson wove the fallen branches into the prone sculpture, laboring in the rain or at night. He adds, "This whole sleeping figure arose." "There were reports in the newspapers and on the radio, but no one knew who did it." He left the mammoth for two or three years before dismantling it late one night and leaving no trace.

From then, he created several "sculptural environments" in Canadian and New Zealand woodlands. He shows me photos of an exquisite wooden shrine he built in honor of the spirit of free foxes, which stands next to a high fence enclosing one of Finland's extensive fox farms. He was hired to work at LeHigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, but a paperwork mix-up resulted in his deportation, which bans him from returning to the United States.

Wilson has always refused to accept money for his gum paintings since it seems to go against their ethos, yet he is considering allowing individuals to make a gift if they can afford it. Despite the fact that he currently lives alone, he has three children in their twenties, whose photographs hang alongside his paintings on his walls. I'm curious as to how he has sustained himself while working long days on the streets.

"It's been extremely difficult," he admits. "I've had work sold in galleries before – [he recently had a show at the Hoxton Gallery in east London]." I've been asked to create trails in many places, including Zürich, Brussels, and Amsterdam. I've given a lot of seminars at schools."

He just devised a method for melting gum images onto a house brick so that anyone might purchase them. He adds, "I believe certain organizations could assist with funding." "However, they never do." As it is, he is always concerned about how he will pay his rent.

Despite this, he intends to continue on his never-ending path until he is unable to lay down. He flips through a folio of his images, remembering their backstories. "This one was for a wonderful woman who runs a charity that helps children in South African townships who have been rescued from fire."

Above a portrayed handshake, he notices another inscription: He grins as he reads, "To the common unfolding humanity who cross this bridge." "That was a great line."

Thanks to Tim Adams at The Guardian whose reporting provided the original basis for this story.