JAM Bottle Cap Art derives its name from the initials of its founder and artist, Jeffrey Adam Maszaros.
Maszaros was a bartender at a beer-focused bar in Edmonton, Alberta when he noticed the different shades and art on the beer bottlecaps. “I saw that these caps all had these cool colors and cool logos,” says Maszaros. “It pained me to throw them out.” So he stopped throwing them out.
“I didn’t know what I would do with them, but I knew I needed to save them,” he says. By the time he had accumulated somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 caps — he didn’t count — he knew he needed to do something with them.
Maszaros has no formal art training beyond whatever classes were offered as part of school as a child. “But I’m a doodler and I was an actor and I have a naturally creative mind,” says Maszaros. “At the same time, I’m analytical, hard-working and I persevere.”
Although he can’t point to an “a-ha” moment when he realized he could make portraits from the bottle caps, at some point, Maszaros decided to make a mosaic portrait of John Lennon, one of his favorite musicians. He did not know how to do it and it did not come easily. “It was a bit experiment of trial and error,” says Maszaros.
He experimented with how to flatten the caps, folding the ridged skirt of the caps so the mosaic would be smoother, folding caps to create sharp lines and experimenting with various fasteners (now he uses small nails). “I would have to walk away from it for a few months,” says Maszaros. “But then I would dream of solutions to my problems, wake up the next morning and get back at it.”
That first portrait of John Lennon took Maszaros six years to complete, but the rest, as they say, is history. As soon as that first mosaic was finished, a bar owner saw the portrait and immediately commissioned Maszaros to make a portrait of Joe Strummer of The Clash. Having honed his craft, that second piece only took between three and four months to complete and now hangs at Arcadia Brewing in Edmonton where others saw it and commissioned more work.
Since 2022, JAM Bottle Cap art has been Maszaros’ full-time job. He now has pieces across Canada and the United States, as well as Europe, the United Kingdom and Africa. A typical 4-foot-by-4-foot piece contains between 3,500 and 5,000 bottle caps (donated by bartender friends or bottle cap collectors who don’t know what else to do with them), but his largest work was a diptych of 9-foot-by-7-foot panels for the KFC Yum! Center in Louisville, KY.
About 500,000 bottle caps are in Maszaros’ storage at any given time. From these, he can select precisely the right shade to create the highlights and lowlights that give the portraits depth and reality. “I really get connected with each piece as I work on it,” says Maszaros. “I will do a deep dive into my subject. When I did a portrait of Anthony Bourdain, I listened to all of his audiobooks and a bunch of podcasts and that directed me and informed the portrait.”
Jeff Meszaros’ portrait of Abraham Lincoln, made entirely from Civil War era newspapers, will be … [+]
It is Meszaros’ attention to detail and his ability to immerse himself into a work, that has gathered him international attention. Eric C. Caren, a collector of historic documents, asked Meszaros to use old newspapers to make a mosaic. The civil-war-era newspapers were ripped or water stained, so they had no collectable value, but, being so old, it seemed wasteful to throw them out — like the bottlecaps that inspired Meszaros in the first place.
After receiving the newspapers, Meszaros examined them, read many of the articles and looked at the illustrations and created a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, entirely from newspapers printed during his Presidency.
That portrait will go under the auction hammer at the Potter & Potter auction in Chicago on April 18, 2024.