Community Support
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 doesn't 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.
Read more about this topic: Ben Wilson (artist)
Famous quotes containing the words community and/or support:
“We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”
—Aldo Leopold (1886–1948)
“... the first reason for psychology’s failure to understand what people are and how they act, is that clinicians and psychiatrists, who are generally the theoreticians on these matters, have essentially made up myths without any evidence to support them; the second reason for psychology’s failure is that personality theory has looked for inner traits when it should have been looking for social context.”
—Naomi Weisstein (b. 1939)