Marc Quirion was on his way to class at the University of Waterloo one morning when he saw the words "you are beautiful" written on a lamp post. That got the gears turning.
"I thought it may be a little cheesy, but it brought a smile to my face," he said.
Quirion, 23, started wondering about a way to capture other touching images and quotes in public places, and how to share them with the rest of the world.
And he wanted to do it with chalk, a medium that makes for friendlier, washable graffiti.
With the help of his friend Mike DiPietro, a domain name was registered and a website was built.
Chalkthoughts.com was born.
"I figured there had to be something I could do with that," said the Kitchener man, now studying for a teaching degree at the University of Western Ontario.
"You can still be artistic and creative and spontaneous and leave your mark in a cool spot, but it's not hurting anything."
Started in May, Chalkthoughts has grown into a unique collection of chalk art, inspirational quotes and expressions submitted from around the world. A new submission is posted daily on the site, and many images are sent in from people's phones.
The creators don't allow crude language, and promote generally positive and sentimental expressions. The "canvases" people have used range from a sidewalk in South Africa to the Terry Fox monument in Thunder Bay, Ont.
This month, the site began reaching traffic of close to 2,000 visitors a day, Quirion said. That's a long way from the website's beginnings, when most of the submissions came from the creators or their friends.
In the very early days, it was just Quirion and DiPi-etro's own artwork, scribbled on surfaces around St. Catharines, Ont. Using thick pieces of dollar-store sidewalk chalk, they quoted Robert Frost on an empty country road, Tupac Shakur on a wharf and Michael Jordan on an outdoor basketball court.
In July, the site received its first submission from a person they didn't know, a girl in Florida. Quirion was ecstatic.
"Someone wrote on a set of stairs, 'I will love you every step of the way.' I was so excited," Quirion said, walking through the woods with a pocketful of chalk.
"That was the coolest thing, knowing that someone saw our website and took the time to go out and do something like that."
The website is loosely based on the same format as the popular Dear Photograph website, created by Kitchener's Taylor Jones, which posts submitted images of an old picture within a new picture and a few sentimental sentences. Jones and Quirion, coincidentally, used to play hockey together.
There are no plans to try to make money off the site, Quirion said. He wants it to keep growing, but to remain a free forum for people's thoughts and art, in a fleeting medium that washes away with every rainstorm.
"We like the idea that you can create art anywhere," he said. "We like that you can take a picture, upload it to the Internet, and even though it will wash away, it lives on Chalkthoughts forever."
