Wade Carey interviews Tim Conlon on East City Art
East City Art recently put up their interview about the upcoming exhibit opening at Studio H on June 19th. An excerpt:
“I met with Tim Conlon in his Petworth studio and home on Tuesday, June 15th. We spent about an hour talking about his work and the history of graffiti in art and in our culture. He was preparing for the opening of his show, “Derailed” at Studio H, Saturday, June 19th. The interview transcript has been edited for concision and clarity.
Wade Carey: There are several different things that I think I can ask inside the house but let me just ask a couple of things about what you work with here in the studio. Do you use aerosol exclusively in the work you’re doing now? Have you changed at all since you started?
Tim Conlon: No. At least for the series, when I’m doing the train canvases, 98% is spray paint. I use some paint markers and then I sometimes use some acrylic washes but mostly I use spray paint.
W: What is a paint marker?
T: I do have some out here. They’re these oil-based paint markers.
W: More a pen than a spray. You’re putting pen marks on the surface.
T: Right.
W: Is it after or before you’ve gone to the aerosol?
T: It’s a mixture of both. When I do the train canvases, there are a lot of layers of spray paint. I just start off with a base coat, misting it back and forth, wiping it.
W: You’ve worked on plywood but this is canvas. Have you changed to canvas because you’re working more as a fine artist? Is there any specific advantage to canvas?
T: I haven’t found a difference between board and canvas. Actually, I got these large canvases from a friend of mine, he was getting rid of a bunch, he was switching to all board stuff.
W: There you go, you get some for free! They are lighter. For your work I don’t know why canvas would be better.
T: Yeah, they both work well. I’ve noticed sometimes when doing the train stuff, sometimes the canvas has a better texture than a straight board but a board reacts more with the paint as if I were painting on a metal train just because it’s smooth.
W: Have you ever thought about painting on aluminum or steel?
T: I have. I’ve talked to my friend Billy Colbert about aluminum. He uses it.
W (laughing): You could get aluminum in Baltimore pretty easily.
T: That’s exactly where he gets his aluminum. That is what I think I’m going to try next because as far as painting trains that’s what I want.
W: It seems like the perfect medium for doing the your kind of aerosol work.
T: Exactly.
W: Let me see if there’s anything else I need to ask about while we’re out here in the studio.
T: The spray paint, in particular. I use a European spray paint instead of regular Rustoleum. I do have regular American paint but the reason I use the European paint is because of the color range and also this “94” paint has a matte finish and also it is low-pressure. If I’m painting, I can really produce a fine spray.
W: So low pressure has to do with the amount of aerosol that’s in the can?
T: Right. It’s the amount of pressure that’s in the can. So I can get really fine clean lines.
W: So you are not getting a spatter effect. It’s more like airbrushing.
T: Right.
W: Is it wrong to think of aerosol painting as airbrushing writ large? At least in the beginning when you’re working with—you mentioned Rustoleum. When a person starts putting paint on trains, one would have to work fast and would to use what one could afford. Presumably that means that you go to the hardware store and you buy whatever you can find in the colors you find the most attractive.
T: It used to be like that but not any more. Now you can go online and order any of this paint. Actually, I can get this European paint at Utrecht or Plaza. A couple years ago, you’d have to special order it. Now some of the hardware stores are starting to carry it, like Ace Hardware. You used to be limited in your color palette and the cans you were using. The cans didn’t have the technology built in. This “94” paint is made by graffiti writers in Spain so they know the nozzle systems. All the caps can give a different effect. That might be similar to airbrushing but I’m not familiar with it, really.
W: It’s the same idea. You have a wider or narrower range of tips. In fact, computers borrowed from airbrushing for some of the tools used with the mouse. Clicking on a surface where you’re actually using the mouse sort of mimics the use of a spray nozzle. There are two different parts to my understanding of the work that you do. One is the work itself and the other is the sharing of information and culture and technique within the community. You mentioned the Internet. Has that changed how you approach what the community is? Did it used to be something that was entirely visual? Were you pretty savvy to the Internet in the beginning of your activity—when you first went out to the train yards?
T: I started in 1993 when I was in college in Baltimore. I was studying digital imaging so I was familiar with computers and the Internet was becoming more main stream. Early on, there were some graffiti message boards that were popping up where people were interacting. You couldn’t really trade pictures at the time, it was really too slow to upload photos but we were able network and I could contact somebody out in, say, Texas or something like that, and get their information. First, it was only talk on the Internet but then somebody would take pictures of trains that I had painted in Baltimore that made it out their way. I would take pictures of what made it to the East Coast. We were communicating through the Internet but the technology wasn’t there to actually share photos. It was more like a pen pal system. Then I would say around 1995-1996 Web sites started popping up with photos. It became more instantaneous. After that the people I was communicating with around the country were sending pictures back and forth. We were building our own Websites, posting and stuff like that….
