Articles

Sarkin will be in a group show entitled Visions Outside at the Riverfront Gallery in Millville, NJ from June 19 through July 5, 2009.

Previously referred to as the "Continuous Interview" this is a dialogue between Sarkin and Gary Baum concerning many various topics.

Gloucester artist, Jon Sarkin, will present new and past works at the SHRINE Gallery on Rocky Neck. With the help of the Madfish Grille, this will be Sarkin's first show at the historic Rocky Neck Art Colony, and his first exclusive show ever on Cape Ann.

I stopped by Jon Sarkin's Gloucester studio last week. Sarkin, who was featured in the 2006 DeCordova Annual, has been painting portraits lately.

Artist and poet Jon Sarkin ’71 visited with art and creative writing classes during the week of April 14-18, 2008, and shared ideas with students to unlock their creativity. Sarkin knows something about releasing one’s creativity. After a life-changing stroke, he has pursued art obsessively, gaining insights into the creative process along the way.

Works by Alice Attie, Marc Bell, Vivienne Koorland, Jane Laudi and Jon Sarkin

Imagine surviving a massive brain injury, then waking up in hospital to discover your personality has completely transformed.

Two artists with an extremely rare condition called Sudden Artistic Output, Jon Sarkin (Boston, USA) and Tommy McHugh (Liverpool,UK) will meet for the first time to talk and work on their art together. Both artists had a stroke a number of years ago and have since developed a compulsion to write, paint and sculpt. They have become prolific, full time artists with exceptional talent.

Jon Sarkin has received a great deal of attention from the media in the past year, but his strangest experience was seeing his own face on a poster stuck to a light post in New York City last weekend.

What separates the artist from the rest of us mere mortals? In Jon Sarkin’s case, it turned out to be a stroke. The deluge of blood that drowned certain parts of his brain also flipped a switch that turned on a torrent of creativity. Suddenly the buttoned-down chiropractor had a compulsion to create and an artist was born in a man approaching his fifth decade.

Dan King creates music. Ian McColl creates theater works. Jon Sarkin creates art.

They are now pulling together an event featuring all three elements for "Big Top Road," which they promise will be a unique program.

"The title, like the event, is totally open to interpretation," he said.

Jon Sarkin headed to Manchester for Sunday night's Dylan show. He was kind enough to send us a review, in boldface.

GLOUCESTER -- The phone rings. Jon Sarkin jerks through a doorway at the bottom of the stairs into his chilly basement studio. It's a mess. An overflowing garbage can. Scattered art. Without his cane, Sarkin, a thin, bearded man in a paint-splattered sweatshirt, moves unsteadily through the debris. He kicks aside some canvases, leaves a footprint on others.

The skies were crystal clear over the Cape Ann Golf Course that day in October 1988 when Jon Sarkin, a buttoned-down chiropractor from Gloucester, Massachusetts, bent over to retrieve a tee. Sarkin, 35 at the time, suddenly felt an intense physical sensation -- a deep shiver -- go through him. Everything looked and sounded different. "I remember thinking, I'm going to die," he says today.

Two local residents who have led divergent and complicated lives have come together to throw a party of sorts to celebrate life itself through paint and canvas.

When poet and rocker Patti Smith said, “In art and dream, proceed with abandon; in life, proceed with balance and stealth,” she may have been describing the life of Jonathan Sarkin ’71. His life, artistry, and vision are a seemingly complex balance between chaos and control. Thus too are his artistic works, which he even finds challenging to verbalize before settling on a “cross between the Wall Street Journal and Captain Kangaroo.”

"An American chiropractor called Jon Sarkin sustained frontal lobe damage and went on to become a successful artist. His story is about to be made into a film by Tom Cruise."

Tom Cruise is entering"Rain Man" territory, with a biopic of off-kilter artist Jon Sarkin. The "Mission: Impossible" star has tapped writer-director Billy Ray (of upcoming Hayden Christensen starrer "Shattered Glass") to develop the project.

LOS ANGELES (Zap2it.com) - Billy Ray's career is picking up steam. "Shattered Glass" marks his directorial debut this month under the guidance of Cruise-Wagner Productions, the brainchild of Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner. His next project will star Cruise himself. The untitled project is a biopic about eccentric artist Jon Sarkin.

Rockport artist Jon Sarkin held a reception Thursday night for an exhibit of his work on display at the Sunny Day Cafe in Gloucester for the next month or so.

David and Sybil Yurman, both artists, have long supported the artistic community in New York and throughout the country. This year they embrace Jon Sarkin, the prolific artist who creates intense, brilliant, dreamlike artwork.

Like a rapper's clarion call cutting through a D.J.'s sample-happy turntable, artist Jon Sarkin's clear-eyed vision peers back at you from the multi-syllabic jumble of his collage-addled canvases. Sarkin's stunning talent calls to mind a kind of Twombly with a twisted sense of humor.

GLOUCESTER, Mass. -- This is what you need to know about Jon Sarkin: Nothing is what it seems. He listens to Mahler, and "Moon River," on the CD player in his art studio; a recent pickup at a local book store included the poetry of Pablo Neruda, and a medical text on anatomy. He is prone to sending his artwork for free through the mail to people he has never met, and yet clients have purchased his work for thousands of dollars.

It all began when Jon Sarkin was golfing at the Cape Ann Golf Course in Essex on Oct. 20, 1988. The 35-year-old Gloucester chiropractor was reaching down to retrieve a ball when he heard a faint snap in his left ear. Over the next couple weeks that snap turned into a debilitating wail.

Though the POW drama "Hart's War" went MIA at the box office, strong reaction to the script has led to a surge of plum projects for scripter Billy Ray, who rewrote Jeb Stuart and Terry George.

One Gloucester resident we met seems unlikely to get upset over traffic jams. Artist Jon Sarkin is too busy creating art in his downtown Gloucester studio, making collages, multimedia constructions, and colored penciled drawings. The subjects: Cadillacs, cacti, aliens, and other non-Fitz Hugh Lane themes. "My stuff is not the Motif Number I, seagull, fishy type of stuff," Sarkin acknowledges dryly.

Jon Sarkin’s studio, located on the second floor of a building in downtown Gloucester, is a mess. Old record albums, pulled from their cardboard jackets, are piled up and strewn about. Scrap paper and other objects — some of it art, some of it balled up McDonald’s bags — litter both the walls and the floor. Some of what’s on the floor may someday hang on the walls, in a magazine, or in a gallery (one of Sarkin’s pieces once brought in $20,000), but disseminating the art from the trash may be a challenge.

Ten years ago a young American chiropractor nearly died. As he recovered, he realised that all he wanted was to be an artist. Now his work sells for thousands and Tom Cruise wants to make a film of his life. Jon Sarkin talks to James Langton.

For John Sarkin, a Massachusetts-based chiropractor, a medical mishap became fodder for creativity -- and a second career as an artist.

LOS ANGELES -- When Jon Sarkin walks down that red Oscar carpet tonight, no one will notice him amid the crush of stars. After the ceremony, at the Vanity Fair party - the holy grail of celebrity bashes - Sarkin will be ignored by parapazzi and fans. But just wait a couple of years, and all of Hollywood could be at his feet. Such is the power of a truly gripping life story. So amazing is that story, in fact, that Tom Cruise bought the rights to it. Hot on the heels of such torn-from-the-headlines films as "Erin Brockovich," "The Hurricane," "The Insider" and "Boys Don't Cry," Cruise hopes that the 46-year-old Sarkin's epic ordeal will bring him the Best Actor Oscar he craves.