Sketching the Pandemic Year 2020 Week 10 March 1-7
On one of our last days during the London trip, we stumbled upon Ben Wilson, the chewing gum man. He was sitting on the sidewalk and painting on discarded chewing gum in Muswell Hill neighborhood. I was excited to meet him as I had read about his ‘street art’ He says he is “taking thoughtless action and trying to transform them into something positive - it’s a form of recycling.’ People commission him to paint discarded gums and that morning he was painting gum in honor of Lola, Arielle, Hugo and Oliver :) Coming home and studying the photos I had taken, I saw that one of his tiny paintings said “world within worlds /one world” I laughed out loud at the serendipity of pairing for this week in the Smithsonian Engagement Calendar 2020 - ‘Cassiopeia A digital photograph made by processing x-rays detected by Chandra X-ray Observatory’! The caption reads : “Cassiopeia A is the debris field of a exploded star known as supernova remnant, located about11,000 light years from Earth. This exquisitely detailed image from the space- based Chandra x-ray Observatory shows the location of different elements in the remnant including silicon (red), sulfur (yellow), calcium (green), and iron (purple)
Check here for a short video on Ben Wilson and @benwisonchewinggumman on Instagram to see his works of gum art.
World within worlds - one world March 1-7 2020 watercolor pen and ink by Meera Rao
