Photo: Dan Bradica
Ever since golden era subway graffiti in the USA ‘died’, writers in America have found a rolling alternative in freight trains. From what I’ve noticed, those into freights are really, REALLY into these big metal giants – it’s an obsession.
Which is why the current Beyond The Streets exhibition in New York City could not exist without some nod to freight culture. And nod they have. Alongside a section of freight monikers, the show features a display of model trains carrying the names of selected heavy hitters.
The Freight Train Graffiti section in Beyond The Streets is curated by Tim Conlon, and has evolved from earlier displays. The first iteration was showcased at ‘Art in the Streets’ at the MOCA LA in 2011 (curated by Jeffrey Deitch, Roger Gastman, and Aaron Rose). The MOCA show was the first large-scale graffiti/ street art show in a US museum and it was a big deal for freight train graffiti to be featured in a real art museum.
Fast forward to 2018 and the trains were included in the first Beyond The Streets (a major exhibition curated by Roger Gastman) show in Los Angeles, and then again in Brooklyn, New York in 2019.
I caught up with Tim Conlon during the New York leg of Beyond The Streets to get the lowdown on the show and his evolution as an artist. If you haven’t made it to the show yet, be quick. It finishes this Sunday 29 September.
Photo: Dan Bradica
Hi Tim, thanks for taking the time to do this interview. I’m excited to get a little bit more background into the display at Beyond The Streets and what you do.
You curated the G scale train exhibit within the MOCA show, can you tell the story of how that came together? This was 2011, how significant was that moment?
Roger is an old graffiti friend of mine from growing up near Washington DC, so we have known each other since the early 90s. He knew that I had an extensive network and knowledge of freight train writers. About six months before the opening at LA MOCA, I received a call from Roger who had an interesting proposition: he asked me to curate the freight train display as part of the graffiti timeline in the exhibit.
Roger had seen the model boxcars that I had painted for smaller gallery shows and thought it would be great to select a group of graffiti artists to paint a batch of trains for the museum. I was excited about the opportunity, but I knew I would have a lot of work ahead of me because of the scale of the exhibition. Being responsible for getting these art pieces to a bunch of different writers who may have never painted a model train before was a little stressful initially, but it came together really well.
These model trains then resurfaced last year for the Beyond The Streets show in Los Angeles. What was different between the display in the original Art in the Streets show versus the Beyond The Streets LA and NY shows?
Initially there were twelve G scale model trains in Art in the Streets. For Beyond The Streets in LA we added six new boxcars and the original engine that was supposed to pull the MOCA trains on a track. For Beyond The Streets in NYC, we added one new boxcar, so the current total is 19 painted trains.
Photo: Dan Bradica
How did you choose the writers to paint the model cars for these shows? First MOCA, and then the two Beyond The Streets shows?
When I was asked to do the MOCA show, I immediately tallied in my head over 50 train writers that I thought should be included, but I was going to be restricted to just twelve trains to display.
In order to narrow down the list of potential artists, we decided the writers should be pioneers from the early 90s when graffiti was just starting to take off on rolling stock. The other decision was to try to cover different regions of the United States to have a diverse representation of freight trains painted during that era. A few of the cities covered included Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Atlanta, Jacksonville, Miami, Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Portland, and Seattle.
I asked a handful of prominent freight writers to come up with their list of who they thought were significant writers in the early freight scene. That way it was easy to see whose names repeatedly popped up on multiple lists. After much polling and debate, a total of 24 artists were chosen so we could feature two on each of the twelve boxcars.
I know you added some extras for the New York show. How important was the legacy of freight writing when selecting artists?
Roger had been planning the first Beyond The Streets show for many years, so he had already envisioned it as a follow up to Art in the Streets. He asked me to participate and show some of the train paintings I had been working on and we decided to exhibit MOCA’s trains and add some new ones to that collection.
I felt there were a few gaps in the boxcars that were displayed at Art in the Streets. Some writers didn’t have an interest in doing model trains, while others we couldn’t get ahold of at the time. I went back to those original lists of writers and crews that we discussed being in the museum show and started reaching out to people. It was great to include twelve more freight writers we wanted for the original MOCA collection, as well as fill in some of the missing sections of that early legacy.
The only new G scale train for NYC was the A2M car with NEKST and VIZIE. I had been friends with these brothers for years, so it was notable to have VIZIE on a car and also have him do a dedication for NEKST.
I get the feeling that Beyond The Streets LA exceeded expectations, which is what lead to the current New York show. What was the interest like in the freight section at this show? Was the reaction something that surprised you?
Ever since the debut at Art in the Streets, I’ve watched the interest in the freight section continue to grow, which has allowed that part of the show to develop and expand as Beyond The Streets has progressed. Showing work next to Bill Daniel and buZ Blurr (Colossus of Roads) completes a broad picture of older, moniker-based writing, the modern letter-style painting, and the documentation of the culture of the railroad.
I will say I’ve been surprised by some of the celebrities I’ve spoken to who are really into the trains such as Seth Rogan and Terry Crews. LL Cool J liked them so much that he commissioned some for his own art collection.
It feels like for (almost) as long as writers have been painting freights, they have been scooping up scale models of trains and painting their names on them with paint markers and acrylic paints. The trains you put together are on another level of quality though. I know you custom age the cars before you ship them off for writers to paint – can you explain a little more your process in selecting which cars to work with, and then preparing them? Are they always based on real freights?
Back when we did Art in the Streets, the cars that were selected were Aristocraft 53′ Evans boxcars. The primary reasons for choosing these cars were their length, flat sides, and several color schemes that would work well for all the writers to paint. I wanted the models themselves to be identical, so we could focus on how each one was painted in their own styles.
I didn’t know how to do model weathering at the time, so I went online to research how it was done and stumbled upon a group called The Weathering Shop. That group of guys created some of the most realistic small-scale HO trains I had ever seen. Since I didn’t have time to learn and weather the MOCA trains myself, I reached out to them to see if they wanted to work on the G scale trains and be part of the museum show. Thankfully they did! It was quite a jump in scale for a lot of that team to work on, but they turned out beautifully. They lived all over the country, so I was constantly shipping these trains back and forth for different people to weather and then on to other people to paint their graffiti, then finally to the museum in LA. It was a small miracle that none of these trains were damaged or lost.
After Art in the Streets I wanted to learn how to do the weathering myself, so I learned a lot from the Weathering Shop guys and continued to figure things out through experimentation. In the seven years between Art in the Streets and Beyond The Streets, I developed some concepts and processes for my trains, so they felt like standalone art pieces. Some trains have been based off of real freights, others have just served the purpose of being the canvas for whatever random graffiti-based cartoon theme I want to apply to them. This was pretty similar to how I would approach painting a real train.
The additional boxcars that have been added to Beyond The Streets have now all been weathered by me. I’ve used the same Aristocraft 53’ Evans cars, but they are pretty hard to come by now. The company went out of business many years ago.
Maple was telling me that you were going to have a real track pulling the cars through the show in New York, which would have been amazing. What happened with that idea?
Actually, we were going to have the trains first run on track at Art in the Streets. I worked with a group in North Carolina who figured out the amount of space needed to run the 12 G scale cars on a loop, which was about 10’ x 25’. They developed a motion activated system that would power up the engine and pull the train when someone was standing in front of the exhibit and then would power it down after a few minutes. Unfortunately, the museum layouts changed as the show was coming together, so that idea was scrapped because there wasn’t enough space for the track.
When Roger and I talked about displaying the trains for Beyond The Streets, we wanted to fulfill the original plan and run them on track. In fact, Roger wanted to figure out if we could do some sort of large-scale scenic layout that could somehow be broken down and portable, so as the show would travel from city to city it could be reused. We were already adding more trains to the display, so that meant the radius of the track would have to increase even further. I spoke to a bunch of different fabricators but in the end, it was going to be too expensive and take months to build, so we decided to just wall display the boxcars and engine.
After the success of Beyond The Streets in LA, we discussed coming up with another way to run the trains in NYC in the initial planning stages. But the venue location kept changing which meant floor plans for the show had to be reworked, so again we had to set this idea to the side. I’m hopeful they will eventually be displayed on a running track as we intended!
Which is your favourite car in the show? Tell me why you like this particular one?
I think I would have to choose the SMITH/CYCLE car. Mainly because Chris (CYCLE) painted an amazing self portrait of himself dressed as Napoleon hoisting a tall boy of Budweiser while riding on a Tauntaun from The Empire Strikes Back.
Now let’s step back a little further, I know you started out in the 90s, painting freights in Baltimore. Can you tell me more about your history as an artist and what lead you to be the go-to guy for scale freight model activation? How did you become obsessed with freights?
I started when I was in college in Baltimore back in 1993 and hanging out with friends who were skaters and graffiti writers. We ran all over the city looking for skate spots and ended up discovering a lot of abandoned spots with really old graffiti pieces. Baltimore has a long history of graffiti with its own unique style and I quickly became enamored with learning all about it. I started to document every old tag and piece I could find. This became an obsession and it was only a matter of time until I made the transition from observer to practitioner. I have a long-held interest in freight trains and its infrastructure. There was so much commercial cargo heading from Baltimore Harbor to other cities across the country that trains were everywhere and provided a simple means to spread your work across the country.
After college – like thousands of others – I joined the tech boom. In short order I went from design and production to managing other artists and leading teams in marketing and PR firms. I began to understand how once again I was operating in a world where icons, colors, and brands are king. And so goes the story that defines my artistic style.
In 2008 I was featured in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition, RECOGNIZE! Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture which launched my art career. Galleries approached me to do shows, which I had never done before, so I needed to come up with a body of work. I wanted to explore a different way to present graffiti to an audience in a gallery setting, so I decided to focus my art on preserving some of the history and logos of old train companies that had consolidated or fallen. At the same time I was doing the large Blank Canvas paintings, I created smaller model trains to paint on as scale studies.
You call Los Angeles home now. How do you like it compared with living in Baltimore? You still catching freights out there?
This is actually the second time I’ve lived in Los Angeles. I moved from Baltimore to LA in 1997 and lived there for almost two years but ended up going back to the east coast to Washington DC for work. I always wanted to move back to LA though. It was after I started doing art full-time and had an art show with The Seventh Letter in 2014 that I talked it over with my wife and we decided to make the move. We bought a house in LA, but kept a place back in DC so we travel back and forth.
I was painting a bunch of trains in Los Angeles back in 97. There were so many more spots and varieties of trains to paint then there are now. I think that is true for many US port cities, as freights have converted to shipping container intermodals. These days I prefer to travel and connect with friends to paint.
How many model trains have you had a hand in painting? I can count at least 160 G Scale trains on your site. It’s pretty impressive.
I’m guessing I’ve painted somewhere close to 250 G scale trains. There are many private commissions that I don’t post on my website. I’ve also weathered a bunch of G scales that other friends will end up painting with their graffiti. Then there are the smaller O and HO trains I’ve painted over the years, but those are pretty limited as I prefer sticking to the larger trains.
The 1/8 Scale are probably among my favourites. I’m assuming these are custom fabricated. What’s involved in making these ones a reality?
I’ve now done five of these larger trains. I have worked with three different fabricators and each one has been a completely different process. It started with the gallery I was working with in the Hamptons learning that art collectors in that region wanted much larger boxcars than what I was doing on G scales. After doing a bit of research, I discovered the 1/8 scale train scene and found the guys who hand build these trains for me. I had specific ideas in mind so took some time to go back and forth on the design and how they would be constructed. Some would come from kit pieces, some were made completely out of metal, and some we used fiberglass pieces to make them lighter (they can weigh a couple hundred pounds.) Some of them are a bit more functional and open from the top like a trunk so you can put things inside, etc. They end up taking a few months to build before I get to work painting them. They are over 5 feet long, so it takes a while to do all the minute weathering details.
*Fun facts:
The current train on display at Beyond The Streets NYC was originally built to spec so I could recreate the ‘Breaking Bad’ wholecar that we painted on the day the last episode aired. Roger saw the train at my studio and wanted it for the show, so I didn’t have time to paint it as planned. Hopefully I will get to it after the NYC show.
‘Iron Man’ Robert Downey Jr. owns one of these trains.
With your Blank Canvas series, you realistically paint cropped sections from real life freight trains onto canvas. Some of these include sections of pieces by other writers. Including the late SACE, NACE, & ACNE. How did this series come about and how do you approach selecting the crops? I imagine your mindful of how the work will be perceived when appropriating the work of others?
The original idea behind the Blank Canvas paintings was to make the viewer feel as if they were standing in front of a chunk of an actual freight train, which I had considered a ‘blank canvas’ to paint on for decades. They are done almost entirely with spray paint. I wanted to use the skill set I had honed from doing graffiti over the years and apply that to my gallery work, but I didn’t want to just do paintings of graffiti. With the train canvases I found I could add graffiti as a layer in the larger work.
Graffiti is ephemeral by nature, especially on trains that are exposed to the elements as they travel the continent. With these paintings, I like to show cropped sections of both the old logos and the graffiti that was applied to the train, so you have a visual sample of a freight car. If you want to see the entire graffiti piece or logo, you’re going to have to go bench the lines to track down the actual car. More than likely that short line train is probably no longer around. Most of the graffiti I use in the paintings are from crewmates and friends, so if it’s on a painting it’s because I admire and want to preserve their work in the larger context of this series. It could be a section of a letter or two, the top of a piece or maybe just some bits and an arrow, but it is a respectful nod to them.
I’ve lost a lot of friends over the last couple of years to accidents, suicide, and drug addiction, which has led me more recently to paint homages to the memory of what they had contributed to freight train graffiti. It has been a cathartic process. I was painting the SACE, NACE, and ACNE tributes when Beyond The Streets NYC was originally slated to be held at the World Trade Center, before it eventually moved to Brooklyn. It felt poignant – since these guys held a definite presence in the freight and NYC graff scene, I felt that their graffiti should be included in the show.
I also see that the railway logos are a prominent fixture in these paintings. Tell me about the attraction to these graphic elements, and the significance of the symbols that you choose.
There have been so many short line railroad companies in North America since World War II that you had a large amount of logos and color schemes on the lines to promote these different railways. As larger Class I railroads bought up these smaller companies and consolidated their routes, the freight cars were often repainted. If they were simply re-stamped with the new rail company initials, the old company logo was just left to weather away.
There is also a “40-year rule” for freight cars where they are either scrapped or rebuilt with an additional 10 years of service before being retired. When I first started painting, I was still seeing a lot of old cars that were reaching the end of their lifespan, so I documented their logos. If you are into graffiti, you are probably into typography. This may explain why the fonts and colors these companies used interested me from a design perspective. But it was definitely the imagery used in their logos that I found odd and it also fascinated me: you could find kittens, goats, bears, cows, geese, eagles, champagne glasses, belts, shields, lightning, snowflakes, icicles, apples, oranges, girls holding fruit, pine trees, flags, crosses, monuments, yin-yangs, islands, rainbows, sunsets, etc. Freight trains were the original emojis.
Back to the real world. Can you share with us one of your favourite/ most memorable moments actually being out around these metal giants? (Doesn’t have to be positive, just an interesting story).
Since I’ve already mentioned the ‘Breaking Bad’ wholecar, I’ll share a bit of the backstory. The night before the final episode of the show aired, I was out partying with friends and I received a late-night text from my friend KRUDE alerting me that one of our spots was laid up with three boxcars. He and SUPER had drawn up a plan to do a wholecar, which included me and AREK to help paint. I drunkenly told him to scrap their design because we needed do a Breaking Bad themed wholecar! But I was shocked to find out that none of those guys had even watched the show at all!? Along with The Wire, based and filmed in Baltimore, this was one of my favorite TV shows ever.
KRUDE and I brainstormed a bit and I tasked out everyone with certain sections of the design that needed to be worked on. I texted AREK and told him to draw up a HEISENBERG piece that night. He thought I was absolutely crazy not knowing what that even meant, but I told him to just trust me and he went to work. SUPER and KRUDE set out designing some of the other layout we plotted out. Sunday morning, I awoke with a solid hangover, but dragged myself out of bed, packed a ton of paint and rendezvoused with the crew. We chose a Southern Pacific boxcar that was completely thrashed from top to bottom with tags and throws.
It was a laborious process, as we were painting in late summer heat and humidity for hours without shade. A little over halfway done, just out of view we noticed a delivery truck driver many buildings away slowly start wandering up the tracks toward us. We began to panic, because we didn’t want to quit after putting in all this work and leave the train unfinished. Someone suggested we would have to tie this guy up until we were done painting and then let him go. As we sat arguing, my head pounding, and time running out, all I could think was this is spiraling into a real Breaking Bad episode.
Maybe the guy spotted us and thought it best to stay clear or maybe it was pure luck and he never saw us, but he casually turned around and just walked away. With a sigh of relief and a second wind, we quickly wrapped up the eight hours of painting. Exhausted and with two hours to spare, I headed home to watch the final episode. Quoting Walter White, and as painted on the boxcar: “Nothing stops this train… Nothing.”
To our surprise that train has been documented all over the country. I’ve never seen a boxcar travel like that before. Benchers and foamers who usually hate graffiti, have chased it down to photograph it for their collections. Railroad workers love it and have even gone as far as to try and match the paint we used to buff out random gang tags it received on its travels.
As of writing this, I hear they are working on a Breaking Bad movie sequel.
Quick questions:
-Top 5 freight writers of all time (living or dead)
JASE
PRE
SENTO
CAVS
KING157
-Who’s coming up that should we keep an eye out for?
KOVET
DUBLE
WALT
BANDOE
WEEK
-Top 5 favourite freight cars?
FGE Solid Cold
GVSR Golden West
WFE
Tropicana (orange scheme)
SOO Line
Thanks for your time. What’s next?
I’m currently working on a bunch of train and canvas commissions, so that is going to keep me busy for a while. I’d like to eventually start planning a new solo show.
‘Beyond The Streets’ is currently showing in Brooklyn, New York City. The last day is Sunday, 29 September 2019. For more information visit: beyondthestreets.com or follow @beyondthestreetsart on Instagram.
To stay updated with Tim Conlon, visit:
Instagram: @conoperative
Website: conoperative.com
Luke Shirlaw is the founder of Artillery Projects – a graffiti art publisher, and visual studio specialising in mural production, graphic design, and content creation. Follow him on Instagram, or subscribe to Artillery’s ‘The Drop’ for exclusive email interviews.