The visionary artist Jon Sarkin died in his storefront Fish City Studios at 39 Main St. in Gloucester on Friday afternoon, July 19. [Update July 26: I’m hearing a memorial service is being planned for Monday, Aug. 5, from 1 to 5 p.m. at the Elk Bass Rocks, 101 Atlantic Road, Gloucester.] When he and I became friends more than two decades ago, he was a tall frail looking fellow, with misaligned eyes (he struggled with double vision), and a stubbly beard. He walked with a cane, sometimes looking as if he were feeling his way with his feet.
These physical symptoms were the result of a terrible ordeal that began when he was a 35-year-old chiropractor out golfing with a friend at the Cape Ann Golf Club in Essex in Oct. 20, 1988. While playing, he felt a terrible “twist” in his brain, as if his mind had broken in half. Three days tater, he developed a ceaseless shrieking in his ears. To try to get it to go away, eight months later he opted for surgery to release the pressure of a blood vessel on an acoustic nerve at the base of his brain. But a day after the surgery, he suffered a major stroke. Doctors rushing to save him, cut out part of the left side of his brain. In recovery, he developed pneumonia, a heart attack, an ulcer that required stomach surgery.
By the time I met him, the wreckage of his body had forced him to give up his chiropractic practice in Hamilton. Instead he’d taken up drawing, prolifically, relentlessly. He took the bus most days from his Rockport home to his Gloucester studio—renting in Brown’s Mall when I first knew him, later the storefront at 39 Main Street.
Sarkin collected piles of old records from the free bins at Gloucester’s rare and used music store Mystery Train, ripped the sleeves in half, and drew on the gray insides. He covered them with feverish pen and marker doodles of abstracted, distorted cartoony faces, aliens, cacti, sailing ships, 1950s Cadillac tail fins, Batman, fish, bottles, snakes, “emotional self portraits,” references to rock and blues and jazz, obsessive hatched lines (inspired by his deep study of the technique of cartoonist Robert Crumb), wordplay, jokes, lists of words, single words repeated in long columns, words and phrases turned inside out and backwards. On one drawing, he wrote: “Those that do not learn from repetition are doomed to repeat it. Those that are doomed to repetition learn to repeat it. Those that learn from repetition are doomed to be repetitive.”
Years ago, we collaborated on some drawings, trading the pages back and forth. I was in a minimalist frame of mind, and Jon was always a maximalist. I’d leave open spaces in a drawing and he’d fill them up, I’d paint things out to open it up again, he’d fill it up again. Ha!
Sarkin sold illustrations early on to The New Yorker and The New York Times; was featured in the 2006 DeCordova Museum’s Annual Exhibition, a showcase of New England artists; and created the artwork for Boston band Guster’s 2010 album “Easy Wonderful.” After he was profiled in the January 1997 issue of GQ magazine, Tom Cruise’s production company bought the rights to his life story and a screenwriter began making drafts—though, as far as I know, no show has yet resulted. A biography, “Shadows Bright as Glass” by Amy Ellis Nutt, was published in 2011, and Sarkin appeared on Terry Gross’s “Fresh Air” on NPR.
Sarkin was a smart and learned man with a deep knowledge of art history and music. He carefully strategized his art career. Our conversations often turned into twisty philosophical puzzles, punctuated by his deep delighted laughs. He could also be prickly and challenging. In recent months, he told he me remained furious about what he’d lost from his injuries—but had decided that no one wanted to hear him moaning about his troubles. During our thoughtful and fun conversations, it was easy to feel oblivious of how much he struggled.
Sarkin’s studios were always a mess of piles of drawings and records, bins of pencils and oil sticks and Sharpie markers, spills and stains, worn-out chairs, an overflowing trash can, everything sprawling onto the floor to get stepped on by visitors and him. How much did this outward mess reflect chaos swirling in his head? Messy studios always feel full of life to me, so the mess didn’t bother me, but he said it bothered him. He labored to hold it together. Drawing helped him focus.
In the early days of covid, as part of the lockdowns, Sarkin was prohibited from using his Main Street studio. Unable to readily make his art, he told me, he fell apart and wound up institutionalized for a couple (?) weeks. Before long he was back in his studio, drawing and drawing again. He connected with a British gallery in London, he hired a business manager, he worked social media, he exhibited in his studio, six of his artworks were acquired by Paris’s modern art museum, the Center Pompidou.
Art folks often say how art helps them deal with life, but I’d never felt this so urgently as Sarkin’s covid experience made it. It was a lesson I’ve thought about a lot since he told me, and talked with him about it another time, and with other folks. Because what he said also made me wonder how much making art is actually, literally healing for me, for all of us, and how much our mental health may be poorer for not creating enough.
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