By ABBY WIHL
Observer Contributor
April 16, 2008

During a recent brunch at an Irish pub in Dupont Circle, artist Tim Conlon looked across the street at the corner of New Hampshire Avenue and pointed out a white building. Years ago, he was with a friend who drew graffiti on it.

After his friend’s nom de graffiti went up, they saw a police officer getting out of a marked secret service police car. They threw their paint cans in the bushes and ran. Conlon found himself in the stairwell of a neighboring church.

Montana spray paint on Sintra panel (72 x 240 in) by Tim Conlon and Dave Hupp. Photo courtesy of National Portrait Gallery.

But Conlon, 33, now sits in a different position. His name “CON” is proudly written in graffiti in the National Portrait Gallery. He has given up painting the streets and in exchange, art collectors are commissioning him to do pieces on their houses.

The exhibit “Recognize: Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture” at the Smithsonian is Conlon’s third gallery showing. He also recently had work in the Arlington Arts Center.

Jeffrey Cudlin, at the Arlington Arts Center, said the show has brought a new demographic into the gallery. At least 500 people went to the opening, he said.

“I am delighted with the installation,” Cudlin said.

Conlon likes to visit the Smithsonian and listen to what people say about his work. The other day, he overheard someone say: “I wonder if they caught these guys on the street and made them do this as their punishment.”

“I thought that was a pretty funny one,” the artist said.

Dressed in jeans, a black hoodie, a pair of black and gray sneakers with a few dribbles of red paint, and a baseball cap, Conlon said he is amazed that he doesn’t have more paint on himself.

The oldest of three boys, he was born in southern Maryland and got a degree in Web design. Conlon not only works a 9-to-5 job in project management for a Web development firm, but has a hand in clothing and accessory design and making model trains with graffiti written on them for miniature railroad hobbyists.

The toughest part of being in galleries he said is exposing who he is.

“Graffiti is kind of secretive and all that,” he said.

In the early years, Conlon didn’t feel he had enough control over his craft to just write “CON.” Instead, he stuck to painting characters. It was two or three years into painting before “CON” showed up in blues and grays in the abandoned Lansdowne Skatepark in Baltimore, a favorite place to paint for many graffiti artists stopping in the city.

Tim Conlon working on his art. Photo by Abby Wihl.

Conlon, and the group of friends he paints with, used to track the trains that had their art on them across the United States, encouraging their other friends around the country to look at them and add their art as the trains moved west.

Both Conlon and Dave Hupp, a fellow graffiti artist, view graffiti as a collaborative art form. It is rare for an artist to go out alone.

“We bounce off one another, there is energy,” said Hupp. “Nine out of ten times we go out, we both come away happy with what we did.”

Graffiti traditionally is a temporary art form. It gets painted over not only by city officials and other writers, but is oftentimes redone by the same artist.

“It’s kind of good that it goes away, I’ll look at stuff I did a few years ago, and I’ll cringe,” said Conlon.

Conlon also believes strongly in using graffiti to get to know a city. When he started painting, he talked to other writers, learned each individual city’s style and found the best spots to paint. The approach is disappearing because younger artists aren’t doing as much research; instead, they are copying styles they see on the Internet.

Conlon said a lot of politicians wrongly see cleaning up graffiti as cleaning up crime, and sometimes graffiti artists will comply for awhile. But then “somebody picks up a can,” he said.

For now, Conlon has stopped painting under the orange glow of city lights. But at the opening of the Smithsonian exhibit he had on a train hat that he always wore on painting missions.

“He wore a hat the whole time with his tuxedo,” said his mother, Cathy Conlon.

As for graffiti, Conlon said: “You either love it or you hate it, there is no middle ground.”