Art Renegade: Ben Wilson Transforms Gum Blobs on Streets into Miniature Masterpieces (PHOTOS)

Artist Ben Wilson takes your splattered chewing gum on the streets to a whole new level. The unconventional artist's passion lies in transforming blobs of gum littering the pavements into miniature masterpieces, Reuters reported.

Passersby have often found the Cambridge-bred artist painting discarded gum while lying nearly face-down on the streets of London and other parts of Europe. Wilson described his paintings as an effort to turn something some people would find disgusting into something artistic and beautiful. The report also added that the artist prefers to paint over oddly shaped gum splatters to allow art to happen in a random way.

It's not uncommon to see Wilson taking up art as he was born into a family of artists. His bizarre taste for painting such waste, however, is what has put him in the spotlight. According to a Wikipedia entry, the artist's strong dislike towards industrial waste and all other sorts of rubbish urged him to turn them into spectacular art forms.

According to the report, Wilson took to painting chewing gum as a full time job in 2004, and since then he has produced over 10,000 paintings. Although it may seem like an easy job, there are quite a few complexities involved in the process:

Wilson first heats the gum with a small blow torch, and then coats the gum with three layers of acrylic enamel. He uses special acrylic paints to paint his pictures, finishing each with a clear lacquer seal. The paintings take from two hours to three days to produce, the report explained.

Take a look at the gallery of pictures that capture Wilson's best works on the street.