The catalog groups Sarkin's output into series that trace distinct threads of his practice — from compulsive mailings to estate-held masterworks.
Jon Sarkin
1953 – 2024
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
American Visionary Art MuseumPermanent collection, Baltimore
MoMA ArchivesCalvin Tomkins Papers, New York
"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.
Jon at his studio, “Fish City Studios” in Gloucester. Photo: Tom Robinson-Cox
Works Cataloged
5000+
Years Active
1989 – 2024
Collections
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.
Did you receive unsolicited artwork from Jon Sarkin? Contact the estate.
Permanent Collection
A-group works held by the estate and designated for long-term institutional placement. These pieces represent the highest achievements of Sarkin's practice across media and period — selected with the rigor applied to any canonical artist's estate holdings.