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GREENSBORO — Michael Townsend eyed a police car as it drove slowly past Zeto wine & cheese shop on Saturday afternoon.

Townsend said he’s had people sic the police on him a few times, thinking he was some sort of vandal.

But what he was doing Saturday, he was doing with the full consent of the store. And not to worry — if you see him out wielding a roll of green tape, he’s not defacing anything.

He’s just creating art.

The 38-year-old will be designing several “tape murals” in downtown Greensboro this week. His work is exactly what it sounds like — drawings created with tape.

“We can make art accessible to folks who might not normally feel attracted to art,” he said. “And because we’re out working in public, we’re physically accessible, so people can come and engage with us while we’re making the art. It’s an easy way of introducing people to collaborative art.”

The project represents a collaboration among the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Downtown Greensboro Inc. and ArtBeat Greensboro.

Townsend, who hails from Providence, R.I., has been creating tape art around the country for about 20 years. In 2003, he created a mural of falling humanoid figures on the side of the Weatherspoon. Other projects have included murals of circus scenes, bonfires and flying saucers, as well as a Sept. 11 memorial featuring renditions of firefighters on buildings around New York City.

He and two of his fellow artists, Paige Bradley and Colin Bliss, kicked off their Greensboro visit Friday night at Elsewhere Artist Collaborative,  a former antique shop that still has much of it collection — old books, vinyl records, vintage electronics — on display.

“Something like this infuses the arts community with a lot of original ideas,” said George Scheer, collaborative director for Elsewhere. 

Townsend said the “living museum” reminded him of Fort Thunder, a former mill turned underground arts venue in Providence that was bulldozed several years ago.

On a bookshelf at Elsewhere he created a figure brandishing a flamethrower (or “funthrower” as Townsend referred to it several times). The “flames” shooting out were made out of a web of green tape. On the windows he made several “orphans” running out.

At Zeto on Saturday, Townsend worked on a similar theme creating tape trees, plants and an orphan carrying a stick with a knapsack on the end, hobo-style.

He found a nail in the brick wall and hung an actual denim bag where the knapsack was going to be. Later that day he headed over to NewBridge Bank Park.

Townsend said he spends two to three hours on a drawing, depending on the size of the building. He doesn’t plan what to draw until he gets to a building, and he doesn’t use a chalk outline or anything else to guide his drawing. He unspools the tape and, with his thumb, presses it into rough shapes. On the wall the tape lines have a wrinkly appearance.

The tape is of a painter variety, which Townsend orders from Canada.

“You can’t just walk into any store and get the right kind of tape,” he said. “It’s got to be easy enough for a 3-year-old to tear, for an 85-year-old to untangle if it gets to stuck to itself, and for a person who has cerebral palsy and limited mobility to manipulate. It also has to work in 10 degrees and 100 degrees. And you have to be able to remove it without damaging the surface.”

The drawings typically come down after 24 hours and rarely stay up for more than a few days. Still Townsend said he never feels a twinge of regret when tearing down a mural.

“It’s like eating your Thanksgiving dinner,” he said. “You’ve enjoyed the fruits of your labor. And taking it down, it gives you a chance to reflect on the building itself. That building was once transformed. You look at it and know there was once something there.”

Contact Robert C. Lopez at 691-5091 or robert.lopez@news-record.com