By Jack Dylan



Most of us in Montreal are by now already familiar with the work of local graffiti artist Roadsworth. Even before his arrest last November and the subsequent media attention, natives of the Mile End district couldn’t miss his bold and imaginative street installations. You’d be walking across an intersection and suddenly notice that the crosswalk had been turned into a giant light switch. Then the next day, you’d see that an owl had perched on a parking space, or that ivy had grown along the dotted yellow median. This mysterious transformation (and undeniable beautification) of the neighbourhood continued in this fashion for quite some time, along with growing admiration and intrigue of residents. But all ended abruptly, when the elusive good Samaritan known as Roadsworth, a.k.a. Peter Gibson, was arrested and charged with over fifty counts of public malfeasance.

Jack Dylan: For you, perhaps the worst thing that has come out of all this is that you’ve had to stop producing your work.

Roadsworth: That was the first thing that came to my mind when I got out of jail that day. After I spent fourteen hours in a cell, I got out and was cursing the fact that I’d no longer be able to continue. I have hundreds of ideas I wanted to get around to doing.

JD: But now your secret identity has been revealed.

R: Yeah, that was the biggest drag, even more than any concerns about the fines. The overriding concern at that point was the frustration I felt about not being able to continue. But now that I look at it, I feel that it’s been kind of a blessing in disguise in a sense.

JD: How so?

R: Well, I look at this whole project as a sort of gimmick. There are limited amounts of variation on some of the ideas; some of the pieces have more meaning than others for me. But ultimately, it’s definitely not possible anymore. I’d be surprised if I was allowed to continue, it’s definitely over for me in this city. I would like to explore other cities though; I certainly feel there’s room to develop the gimmick. And there are a lot of other ideas I would like to explore.

JD: How would you feel about other people catching on to the idea, picking up where you left off? Your brand of work was a pretty unique thing; people have always ignored the roads.

R: Yeah, it’s true, it’s surprising, definitely. One of the reasons I did it, and one of my fantasies, would be that people would indeed take to painting on the street as an alternate canvas. The walls in Montreal have pretty much been exploited to the maximum.

JD: What do you think of most graffiti in Montreal?

RW: Some of it I like more than others. Some of it I think definitely required less skill or thought than others. I mean, there’s a whole range. But I’m not like a lot of people; it doesn’t offend me in any way. There are a lot of things in the city’s landscape that offend me aesthetically way more than the most primitive tag. My opinion on graffiti in general is that it’s just a natural by-product of human activity. It’s like moss growing on the sides of buildings. And there are a lot more harmful by-products of human activity than graffiti. Now, I don’t think a lot of it is extremely original or exciting for the most part. It doesn’t excite me aesthetically, but it’s not necessarily just about that. There is a whole culture wrapped up into it, and I think that for a lot of people, it’s just a way to belong to something, a way to connect to people in the city. Writing your name on the wall is the most natural thing, and to a certain extent it’s the same reason that I did what I did. It’s a desire to connect in some way with the city or with its people, and if people notice it, and if people laugh, in many ways that’s the ultimate compliment. Actually, I suppose—to go back to an idea we were discussing earlier—the ultimate compliment really would be to see other people actually doing similar stuff. That would be a dream come true.



JD: What happened when you got arrested?

R: I basically got caught red-handed. I was laying something down, and of course at night it’s often hard to tell whether a car is a cab or a police cruiser. So I have a little technique of trying to appear like an innocent bystander. This car rounded the corner, and I sensed it was there, so I went into my pose, and the car turned out to be a cop cruiser, and it bleeped its lights and slowed down and pulled up towards me. Apparently there had been a robbery in the area or something. But as for me, it was completely ridiculous, because I was basically more or less covered in paint, and I gave some really, really lame excuses. My bike was leaning maybe twenty feet away, and my pack was right beside it full of paint and whatnot. And there was a stencil right there on the road, but they actually let me go. They got back into the cruiser, I got on my bike, and I put my backpack back on. Of course I left the stencil. I started biking away and actually about three blocks later they caught up to me. They had gone up and kind of reevaluated the scene a little bit and noticed the stencil, and they then caught up to me. I had been way too casual once I’d gotten away, already thinking that I’d escaped.

JD: Did they know who you were right away?

R: Yeah, they must have. There was a file on me, and they had been looking for me. They had done their homework. I found out, after seeing what evidence has been brought against me, that they’d actually devoted a fair bit of time to cataloguing my activity.

JD: Wasn’t there any question that you were behind all the work?

R: There was a question, but I was being interrogated, and I spent my first fourteen hours in a cell, and then they took me out to question me. I was feeling pretty cracked out at that point, but I didn’t make any official declaration as to what they called the link. The link, which is based on your style, or what they perceive to be your signature. They’ve done it with graffiti artists or taggers in the past, where if you get caught doing your signature, they will link that signature with others throughout the town. Obviously in my case there is no signature, they’re all different, but I guess that they felt that the style was similar enough to make that link. While I was being held, before I was interrogated, they obtained a search warrant and actually went into my home looking for evidence to back up their theories. When they searched my place they found lots of evidence: they found stencils and photos and took my computer. So that was it, basically. After all that, they let me out after fourteen or sixteen hours, and I couldn’t leave Montreal. I couldn’t venture into the Mile End area of town at all. Those conditions have subsequently been released, all except for the one which forbids me to possess spray cans.

JD: Your art has been a very hidden, personal world up until this point.

R: More or less, yeah. I never studied art. I still have a hard time confidently saying I’m an artist.

JD: Before your arrest, when you saw how people were reacting to your work, was it ever hard to restrain yourself from taking credit for it?

R: Well, to be honest, I would never bring it up, but it wasn’t a secret the way people might think it to be. I mean, my friends all knew about it. I wasn’t actively suppressing my connection with the artwork. In fact, before I got arrested, I actually did an interview with The Gazette, but within the article my personal identity wasn’t revealed at all. I was only “Roadsworth.” I was definitely conscious of the dangers.



JD: I don’t thing there is anyone out there who hasn’t enjoyed what you’ve done, no one in the neighbourhood who hasn’t cracked a smile or appreciated seeing your work pop up in their streets. It’s not like there are people out there who are so in love with the way a parking space looks that they’d take offense to your painting flowers over top of it.

R: I think you’re right in that most people do appreciate it, but if you look at it from a purely legal point of view, there are arguments that it poses a safety hazard. For example, if some accident were to happen, somebody could then say, “Well, the lines on the road were not as specified in the driver’s handbook I was given. Therefore…” It creates a dangerous loophole or precedent that could be exploited. As ridiculous as it is, I can understand that viewpoint.

JD: That’s the dilemma, isn’t it? How can the law condone an act that is on the one hand appreciated by the public, but on the other hand does so at the cost of the public’s protection from imagery they may not wanted to be confronted with? If for instance, the city were to allow you to draw and paint in the streets without asking, are they not then implicated by that precedent to allow any other person to spray paint a 30 foot cock in the middle of an intersection?

R: My response to that is that there’s already been a dangerous precedent that has been created, and that that precedent is our entire lifestyle in this city. The framework that we’re now stuck with is far more dangerous and much more threatening than if everybody went out there and started spray painting the roads.