These images are from my first complete photo series, War on Graffiti. I shot it in 2002 with my first digital camera — a little Nikon point-and-shoot. It was small enough to carry everywhere, so I always kept it in my bike bag.

War on Graffiti was both tongue-in-cheek and a pivotal moment for me as an artist. (By tongue-in-cheek, I mean I made the art sound a lot deeper than it was.) In 2001, the September 11 attacks had happened, killing thousands. President George W. Bush had declared a “War on Terror” and was pushing hard to justify a clearly bogus misadventure in Iraq.

I’d been collecting images of graffiti-covered walls that had been painted over. In my artist statement, I wrote that wars are “fought over territory,” and that the process of war itself is misguided — never achieving what it sets out to accomplish. I drew a comparison between the endless covering and re-covering of graffiti and the unending cycle of territorial destruction that defines war.

Under the pseudonym Neutron Starr, I submitted a few photos to a local weekly newspaper in the East Bay. They featured my images and ran an interview. Shortly afterward, I landed my first art “show” at Lanesplitter Pizza in Berkeley, CA. Cumulatively, that was the moment I realized, “I can do this art thing.”

A decade later, I resurrected and expanded the series as part of a group show titled The Ventura County Society of Abstract Expressionist Photography, exhibited at 643 Project Space Gallery in Ventura, CA.