Tim Conlon

Tim Conlon: It was certainly a labor of love back in the early documentation of freight train graffiti. In those days, you could bench for hours and not really catch anything noteworthy; but when you did it was quite exciting, especially the farther the graffiti had traveled from where it was originally painted. Plus, you observed styles with a history from other cities firsthand, without leaving your own. We were still using manual and disposable cameras, and you only had 24 or 36 exposures available on a roll of film, so most people would try to conserve those precious shots. Trading photos with other writers across the continent added to the duration and experience as you would gather a batch of your best photos to send via snail mail and then patiently wait for a return package from what they had caught or painted in their neck of the woods. With the advent of digital cameras, you could take as many shots as you wanted until your memory card filled up. You could see the results instantly on camera and delete photos, so you weren’t wasting time or money getting them printed. 

 

Once the iPhone era came about and put the internet in your hand, those images could be out in the world instantly or immediately texted to the person who had painted the train. I think for most people this was the end of having physical copies of photos of trains since thousands of them could be stored on devices or your computer instead of photo albums. Also, with the internet, you can keep better tabs on your trains to see if they have been painted over by the railroads or other writers; otherwise it is often a roll of the dice if you will ever see those cars again. 

 

As with anything, social media can give a false impression of what is going on in the scene. To really see who is currently up and making an impact on the railroads, you still need to go out and bench. As the old saying goes, “The lines don’t lie.”

In the early ’90s, when people began to really focus and be serious about painting freights and wanting to make their mark on the railroads, it felt like a game of strategy. I lucked out starting in Baltimore because of it being a port city in the mid-Atlantic, as well as headquarters for CSX at the time, so there was already a large railroad history and presence. There were plenty of trains to paint and a huge variety of cars from short lines that were still around before they were consolidated by the larger Class 1 railroads like CSX. 

 

We had all these different color schemed cars with intricate logos that I was drawn to and would photograph. Many of those logos I shot I would later use as reference for some of my paintings. My friends and I would look up these logos and figure out what the company was hauling. and more importantly, to where. That is when we would hunt down certain cars in a yard or layup with our newfound knowledge on where these railcars would end up traveling to. We found trains that were headed to Detroit full of auto parts, trains headed to the Pacific Northwest to pick up wood and paper, refrigerated trains headed to St. Louis to pick up beer and ones to Florida to pick up orange juice, etc. 

 

We started to create a blueprint of what trains we should paint so that we had the best coverage in getting our graffiti to traverse the continent. In fact, we also used the railroads’ own automated phone tracing system given to its customers, so they could follow their freight shipments and deliveries—and we could follow where our graffiti was headed as well!

 

Anything you can think of seems to be shipped by rail on this massive network. I think the general public may underestimate the importance and our reliance on this system working properly at all times.

I’ve referred to these paintings as the Blank Canvas series. They first started off as just snippets set to scale of the section of a real freight car without any graffiti applied, essentially from the point of view of a freight train graffiti writer right before painting the clean blank canvas, as it were. I was just starting out and experimenting with how to make these paintings look photorealistic with mostly spray paint and some paint markers. I wanted to stay within the bounds of the tools a writer would use, so I didn’t want to use brushes or oils. It was interesting to come up with some methods and applications to use with spray paint that I wouldn’t have used to paint graffiti. A lot of it comes down to a stippling technique that takes time to build up on canvas and sometimes can be easily ruined with a clogged or sputtering cap. 

 

I also had to figure out how to work in shadows and highlights to create the multiple dimensional elements that make up the side of a train, which first involved a lot of masking, but thankfully, transparent spray paint became a thing and helped to streamline that process. Once I felt confident in my trompe-l'œil trains, I started adding the easy part, which was sections of graffiti. 

 

I have found the response to be quite interesting. Some people who haven’t seen the paintings in person, but instead view them online, have thought they were just photos taken of real trains. One of my gallerists had even asked me to take more process shots and photos at an angle on a wall because he was having trouble convincing collectors that they weren’t photographs. So I’m happy that the illusion works sometimes!

 

I know this may seem a bit absurd, but I like to paint the train on the canvas in its entirety as if it were a brand-new car. Then I begin the weathering process on top of that, which may include the rail company buffing or painting over repaired parts of the car. I don’t like to skip an area on the canvas just because I know graffiti is going to go over on top. I like to see the canvas as if it were cut right from the train, then properly aged and weathered, before adding the graffiti. Even if no one ever sees that work, which is now an underpainting, there is a satisfaction in knowing it existed and I think the final piece is better served by the process.

The Blank Canvas series is more regimented in that I try to keep the paintings as realistic as possible to what is seen out on the lines. The G scale trains are on a different track where I can have fun and create silly themes with pop culture icons and cartoons, not dissimilar to what I would incorporate when I was out painting on real rolling stock. It is a nice balance and palette cleanser to paint these smaller models in comparison to the large-scale paintings. It goes back and forth in my studio practice as to what I focus on.

 

I have found the G scales have a crossover collector base from model train enthusiasts, current and former rail workers and my traditional art collectors. G scale is also known as Garden Scale which is traditionally run on large outdoor tracks since most of the boxcar models are around two feet in length. I would say the model train collector base for these is much smaller than those of O, HO and N scale trains, which are easily set up to run indoors on a smaller footprint than G scale. The T gauge, which is popular in Japan, has railcars that are the tiniest at about half the size of a finger, so there are many model sizes to choose from! I tend to believe there is a larger collector base overseas for G scales than here in the US, as some of the model companies that have made the train cars have contracted a bit or gone out of business. A lot of model railroaders want to make their setups as realistic as possible, so weathering and graffiti has become an important part of their layouts. 

 

What I like about the G scale trains are that they are large enough to paint on, while adding plenty of detail; like something I would do in a traditional graffiti writer’s black book. I find the other scales quite tedious and small to do, so I tend to shy away from them. I still weather the model in its entirety as realistically as possible, but a piece with characters will end up being much larger than what would be out on a real freight train. 

I certainly feel that freight train graffiti is an American folk art. Though I’ve never thought about it that way, I can see a solid comparison to the Precisionism movement. I like the clean geometry of the railcars as well as the logos and stenciled information that adorns the trains. Kind of like Charles Demuth’s I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold. There is also the industrial look of rivets, ribs, doors and ladders and the shadows they create that I find compelling in creating these images. You also have the precise lines and geometric forms in the graffiti. 

 

But I’m also drawn to seeing how orderly mechanicalism begins to fail, whereas the Precisionists were inspired by its clean look and strength, I believe. I like the dichotomy you have with these giant steel vessels that are slowly deteriorating due to weather and time, but within them are these new and shiny products waiting to be used. 

 

The original paint jobs on the trains often also remain from railroads that no longer exist and have only been renamed and numbered to the larger rail company that bought them out, but didn’t bother with rebranding the entire car to the new ownership. Then, of course, you have the colorful graffiti applied as the next unsanctioned layer to the original that ironically is probably even protecting against some rust and decay! Together it can all appear pretty chaotic, like many stamps of time.

 

By painting a lot of the old, decommissioned train logos in my work, I like to think I am preserving an era of the railroads when there were many more short lines with a heavy branding push to differentiate one shipping company from the next, recognized through logo design and colors. That same idea could almost be used to describe graffiti.