Daniel Montano leads the life of a prisoner four nights a week, sleeping and checking out in the morning. Living in pre-release custody of the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections and hoping to be paroled, "there is no room for any error," he said.

That, of course, also means no more graffiti.

The most prolific tagger in the city's history -- police estimated he caused more than $700,000 in damage to 125 property owners over several years -- has been on pre-release from a 21/2-to-5 year sentence since last August.

He spends his three free nights with his sister in Highland Park. He has been working as a dishwasher, doing scenic paintings for movies and preparing works for an art show, "Invisible Walls, Invisible Children," which opens July 9 at Gallery 4, 206 S. Highland Ave., Shadyside.

Now 25, Mr. Montano says being incarcerated "turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me."

"After my sentence, I went to my cell and cried. My bunkie said, 'You feel like there's nothing that you can change right now but it's not true. You can change what's inside you.'"

He said he has been working on that with the help of jail programs that taught him to turn impulsive action into awareness of the thoughts behind them.

Spray painting on walls "was purely impulsive," he said. Like being under a spell? "The spell of the night," he said, grinning. "I was on autopilot.

"What they teach you in jail programs is cognitive awareness. Your thoughts, your feelings and your actions are all you have power over.

"I always wanted the world to be a certain way, and when it wasn't, I tried to force it," he said. "But I'm learning to accept the way the world is. It's greater than me and I'm never going to win."

On his cellmate's advice, he decided to consider his options.

He said he found a strange sense of freedom in jail. "I thought, I'm here. What am I going to do?

"With addictive thinking, you're always waiting for something, and nothing is enough. Prison became a blank wall. I had all this time. I had time to think.

"I wanted to communicate something to the world with art," he said, "but when you write on walls [in graffiti code], a handful of people know what you mean. OK, so you want to communicate but in a secret language?" He laughed.

At a plea hearing in 2008, Mr. Montano's attorney, William Cercone Jr., described his client's vandalism as the result of "drug binges and an ego trip."

"I would have done what I did if I was on drugs or not," Mr. Montano says now. "Something had to be fulfilled. But the drugs contributed to my downfall."

He served his time first in the Allegheny County Jail, then in three state corrections facilities before being transferred to Riverside Community Corrections, an alternative sentencing center in Marshall-Shadeland on the North Side.

"I'm trying to get paroled," he said. At his first hearing last Friday, he said, "they asked me about my job, where I am living, about my family, about drug use and what I've learned." He said he should hear the results in a month.

In the spring, he knocked on the door at Gallery 4.

Joe Veltri, owner of the gallery, which opened four months ago, said he wasn't aware of Mr. Montano's notoriety when he met him.

"I thought it was a pretty cool idea to put his work in the gallery," said Mr. Veltri. "It falls in line with the genre of art we're trying to push, which is lowbrow art as opposed to art where everyone sticks their noses in air.

"He definitely has an undertone to his artwork. I have seen one of the pieces. I gave him full rein."

On Jan. 16, 2008, two days before the opening of a Mattress Factory show that featured Mr. Montano among 19 artists, he turned himself in and was jailed on $50,000 straight bond. He had amassed what would end up being 18 felony counts and 64 misdemeanors.

The Mattress Factory exhibit was the most significant recognition he had ever had for his art, he said. "I wish I had been able to see it."

The exhibit was of a boy's room with a twin bed, a dresser, shelves and a traffic light. On the wall, mixed-media collages and scrawled messages formed a continuous row. He brought the furniture from home and slept in his exhibit for the better part of two weeks while installing it. The book "Goodnight Moon" lay on the dresser.

In a brochure of the exhibit, curator Heather Pesanti described the scene as "a disconcerting impression of domestic space, imbued with a dark sense of foreboding. Montano's installation forges ambiguous and unanswerable questions as to whether the fury of cataclysmic events exists in the world outside, or within, in our homes and individual selves."

Mr. Montano assembles his art in a house in Lawrenceville that he and another artist share as studio space. His studio, a room in the back, would be withering without the floor fan that beats the heat around. Spray cans of paint are neatly arranged in a box in a corner.

Pieces of his upcoming show are hung on the walls. "Invisible Walls, Invisible Children" is a series of multimedia abstract panels that "tell a story through shapes, colors and textures," he said.

Images of crosses, swastikas, a design that resembles BP's logo and photographs, one of his aunt Gloria as a child, blend with painted designs and shapes. The overall effect in the room is of the grayness of black and white. The media include paint, ink, wood, newsprint, metal, paper, oil, acrylic "and things I find lying on the ground," he said.

Mr. Montano's mother, Joanne Lagratta, said she thinks her son is likely to stay on a nondestructive path. "I do. Drugs brought out the worst in him and enabled him to continue to act like a 16-year-old. Being forced to grow up, I think he is doing a good job of it. I'm very proud of Daniel."

Mr. Montano said he still sees some of his old tags. "They're old and faded," he said.

"I know the way. All I have to do is follow it. I have to fulfill this [need to communicate] in a way that doesn't hurt anyone else or me."

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