The flower delivery guy uses dirt on the hood of his truck instead of paint and canvas

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Driver Rick Minns, thirty-nine, began painting on the mud covering his flower delivery van, just to kill time. Now he is called an artist, and the number of his fans on his Facebook page is growing every day.

Rick Means drives a white truck, but unlike most car enthusiasts, his favorite is when the car is covered with a thick layer of dirt. In just 10 minutes, it can transform a dusty door panel into a work of art. For example, in one of his works, a boy and a girl, squeezing a bunch of balloons, go hand in hand into the darkness along a wide road. Her shyness, his confidence, the curl of her hair, the brim of his hat - the drawing that took Means "a long time: about 10-15 minutes" contains a lot of expressive details. He christened his style "graffilthy", merging the words "graffiti" and "filth" - "dirt".

Means is thirty-nine years old and works for a flower wholesaler in East Anglia. It is no exaggeration to say that over the past few days, thanks to Means' artistic ability, Flowervision has gained a reputation that could hardly have achieved the most outstanding successes in floristry.

“I started doing this two or three years ago,” says Rick. Flowervision faced the problem of stealing from the garages where the company's trucks were parked. “You had to have someone looking after the cars,” he adds. - By and large, all the work was just being around. Out of nothing to do, I started painting on trucks, and these scribbles grew into pictures."

Rick finds pictures on the Internet, or copies pictures using a cotton swab or just his finger. He adds the caption to the picture: "If you are looking at this and smiling, please let me know - Facebook Ruddy Muddy." More and more people are following his instructions.

One of the advantages of painting on a truck, compared to painting on canvas in a studio, is that the paintings become more complex under the influence of the weather. Recently, one of Means' landscapes unexpectedly benefited from a hailstorm: the cloudy sky in the image was covered with white dots where ice pieces hit the van. The best paintings continue to change over the course of several days. “You can leave everything as it is, and after a few days, refresh the image, erasing a little dirt from the right places. Then leave again for a couple of days, and paint on again. " Then, thanks to tonal gradations, depth appears in the work. As for the weather, Means says this winter “the conditions were just perfect. Wind and sun - the dirt stays in place."

Ben Long is another Briton who has turned into a constant hobby the childhood habit of drawing with his finger on dusty cars.