Jon Sarkin

Photo: Janet Knott, Boston Globe

In October 1988, Jon Sarkin was a chiropractor in South Hamilton, Massachusetts, when a neurosurgical complication destroyed a significant portion of his left cerebellum. He emerged deaf in one ear, his vision permanently doubled, his balance irreparably altered — and consumed by an overwhelming, involuntary compulsion to make art.

For thirty-five years, working from his studio in Gloucester, Massachusetts, Sarkin produced an estimated twenty thousand drawings, paintings, collages, and mixed-media works. His method was stream-of-consciousness: layering ink, marker, paint, and found imagery across paper, foamboard, and disassembled vinyl record sleeves. Recurring motifs — Batman, cacti, jazz musicians, mantra-like word lists — cycle through the work with obsessive frequency. He died at his drawing table on July 19, 2024.

His life and transformation are the subject of Shadows Bright as Glass, by the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Amy Ellis Nutt.

Full biography →

Centre PompidouPermanent collection, Paris

MoMA ArchivesCalvin Tomkins Papers, New York

Cape Ann MuseumPermanent collection, Gloucester

"Sarkin's work approaches what André Breton dreamed of but which most Surrealists never achieved: pure psychic automatism."

Colin Rhodes — Distinguished Professor; Contributing Editor, Raw Vision; author, Outsider Art (Thames & Hudson). Published in Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences, Cambridge University Press, 2023.

Rhodes' peer-reviewed essay places Sarkin's practice in direct conversation with Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Basquiat, and Cy Twombly — not as outsider art curiosity, but as work operating on the same formal and conceptual plane. He argues that Sarkin's fragmentation is creative methodology, not neurological symptom, and that the work's recurring motifs across thirty-five years resist chronological reading entirely — everything happens at once. The catalog raisonné's computational iconographic profiling provides the first systematic evidence for these claims.

Read Rhodes' full essay →

Jon Sarkin's working studio, Fish City Studios, Gloucester

Jon at his studio, “Fish City Studios” in Gloucester. Photo: Tom Robinson-Cox

Works Cataloged

5000+

Years Active

1989 – 2024

Boltflashed Pieces

For decades, Sarkin compulsively stuffed envelopes with drawings and mailed them unsolicited to strangers, critics, and public figures — a practice he called boltflashing. Known recipients include the New Yorker critic Calvin Tomkins (whose pieces are now in the MoMA Archives), the Eisner Award–winning cartoonist Tony Millionaire, and director Joel Schumacher. Many remain in unknown hands.

View the catalog set →

Did you receive unsolicited artwork from Jon Sarkin? Contact the estate.