This Street Artist Turns Roads into Colorful Canvases

Those who pass by Roadsworth's pieces might stumble upon a giant ice cream cone.

January 31, 2017, 3:35pm

Images courtesy the artist

If you live in a city with lots of street art, you expect to see it on abandoned buildings, storefronts or large walls. But one artist creates art on a space we take for granted—the street itself. The Canada-based Roadsworth creates incredible pieces that interrupt the gray of the road with bursts of color. Passersby might stumble upon a giant pink ice cream cone, a chain link fence with hands clinging onto it, or a paintbrush with blue splatters. Carefully taking the space into consideration, Roadsworth creates pieces that make each road a canvas.

“The vast majority of the pieces I do are closely related to the space in which they exist so the process almost always begins with a visit to that space,” writes Roadsworth, a.k.a., Peter Gibson, in an email to The Creators Project. “If I'm not able to go there in person, I ask for photos of the site. Google Earth has revolutionized matters in this regard since you can virtually visit most urban locations in the world and get aerial perspectives that are not possible on the ground.”

Aerial views play a big role in the artist’s work. While each piece is very much about the relationship between the civilian and the ground, the pieces look stunning from afar. Each detail comes together to form a larger composition. If another life form saw them as they descended onto Earth, they might think we were trying to send them messages. Some of the pieces are reminiscent of crop circles.

Each piece might hint at a larger message, but what’s important to Roadsworth is that people interact with the pieces. “You know you did a good job when you see that ‘What the..?’ look on people's faces,” writes Roadsworth. “But the range of reactions can be everything from ‘Beautiful!’ to ‘Is this paid for with taxpayer money?’”

He loves getting reactions from people walking the streets before the piece is complete. In one piece, Roadsworth uses the lines of parking lot spaces and transforms them into the veins of leaves. Yellow divider lines become the track upon which a squirrel runs. With rollers, brushes and sometimes spray paint, Roadsworth brings each vision to life after much “rough sketching and note taking.”

When Roadsworth gets the most autonomy, the freedom to use the space as he wishes, the project feels “the most satisfying.”