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Welcome to my first post on the onehumanblog… (this is that post I just have to get out of the way… like making that first mark in a new notebook.) Welcome to my journey…

I’m an artist who lives and creates in Long Beach, California. For over 18 years my wife, Tania, and I have been living and making art in an apartment/studio overlooking the busy street of Broadway.

In the last two years we’ve been joined by a couple of dogs, Moseley and Suki. You’ll probably hear a lot about them if you come back and visit this blog… I spend all day with my pups, and they have changed our world in so many ways.

I’m mainly a collage artist, or that’s the way I’ve described myself in the past when trying to give the simple answer. What does that really mean? I’m kind of a synthesizer – I put different stuff together, things that others might not think go together and make something new out of it. I use collage as my main means of expressing myself this way, be it on paper, in photos, on video, or in cut-and-paste poems and even in the way I approach religion, philosophy and other ideas.

I operate from the idea that an artist’s job is to hold things up that other might have missed or ignored and say, “Look at this.” In this vein I am also a documenter and historian. I think in big pictures, and often approach my subjects from their overall place in the scheme of things as I see them.

Everything I do creatively seems to follow from those concepts…

This last summer I documented Medical Marijuana strains at a local collective. I’ve been a Medical Marijuana (MMJ) patient for a number of years, and I have a project called The MMJ Project that I’ve been working on this last year documenting the current MMJ co-op and collective situation here in Southern California. I figure the situation is bound to change and I want to document what it is really like, right now.

Over this last summer I’ve photographed over 60 different strains of marijuana like these I took last week:

Above is the “overview” shot – always with a quarter for size reference and the weight of the buds. I am trying to show the “average” buds, not the biggest and best. This is what you would get if you went there…

Above is the “close-up” shot. I take a ton of photos to get the best close-up I can… after I take the photos I come home, upload them to my website and the do a menu update on Weedtracker.com – a website for medical marijuana patients with menus and forums for all the different MMJ co-ops and collectives here in California.

It’s been an interesting and eye-opening project to say the least