Cardboard canvas is all S.F. street artist needs
Bootblack, after being hit by taxi last year, uses painting as therapy
Once Jaz Cameron gets his hands on it, a dirty old cardboard box isn’t a dirty old cardboard box anymore. It’s potential.
Cameron snatches up any old cast-off box he can find, carefully takes it apart, lays it flat and begins painting on it. The other day he found a box outside a body shop that once held a car bumper and a smaller box outside an adult novelty shop that once held, well, adult novelties.
Cameron did what he does with most scrap cardboard he comes across. He began painting large, sweeping pastel designs on it. It’s not only art, he said, it’s therapy.
Cameron is a 41-year-old part-time bootblack who was one of three people flung into the street and injured last year when a taxi slammed into a Market Street shoeshine stand. Painting on scrap cardboard helps him feel better, he said, even if sidewalk art pays even less than sidewalk shoeshining.
In recent days, the street artist has been working on the sidewalk next to the Old Mint at Fifth and Mission streets.
“It’s outdoor work,” he said. “I like working outdoors.”
He taped the flattened cardboard onto the wrought iron fence beside the 143-
“You can’t get in that building without a master’s degree, which I don’t have. Anyway, it’s just a bunch of rich guys deciding what’s art and what’s not art. Who needs that? I like what I’m doing.” Jaz Cameron, street artist, referring to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
year-old granite building and began to cover it with brown stars and blue and yellow squiggles. He acknowledged that its meaning is hard to figure out.
Two blocks east, Cameron said, a lot of art that is also hard to figure out hangs on the walls of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His cardboard panels, Cameron acknowledged, will probably always be found outside of museums instead of inside.
“You can’t get in that building without a master’s degree, which I don’t have,” Cameron said. “Anyway, it’s just a bunch of rich guys deciding what’s art and what’s not art. Who needs that? I like what I’m doing.”
Cameron said the painting on the car bumper box he’d be willing to part with for $60, and the painting on the adult novelty box probably less. The bumper box painting measures 15 feet by 5 feet. So that comes to less than a buck per square foot of art. He acknowledged that he has painted a lot more cardboard than he has sold.
The market value of art is no harder to fathom than the odd piece of fate that got him his latest apartment in a nearby South of Market building.
Last year, Cameron — whose given first name is Cornelius — was shining shoes at Market and Sansome streets when a taxi jumped the curb and slammed into his stand. Cameron spent many days at San Francisco General Hospital being treated for head injuries. Surgeons cut out a piece of his skull to relieve pressure.
When the word got out that Cameron was homeless, he said, he suddenly got an offer from the city to move into the subsidized housing unit, which means that his bad luck was also his good luck. Being inside is better than being out.
When he isn’t painting, Cameron plays jazz clarinet tunes on street corners and writes 30-page entries in his journal that he hopes to turn into a book about life on the streets, with a special focus on what can happen to a man while shining shoes at the wrong place and time.
Cameron grew up in Los Angeles and studied art at the University of Nevada, Reno, until he could no longer afford the tuition. He worked odd jobs up and down the West Coast, and occasionally decorated buildings and walls with cans of spray paint, if he thought they would benefit from it and if there were no cops to express their reservations.
Graffiti costs a lot of money to remove but it also costs a lot of money to install in the first place — Cameron says he has spent a small fortune on paint. He buys only highquality paints, because he wants his stuff to last.
It’s definitely art, it’s possibly vandalism (especially works from his pre-cardboard period) but what it is, mostly, is therapy, Cameron said.
“It makes me feel better,” he said. “It’s an outlet. It reworks the muscles in my brain.”