A changed man
Years ago, Jon Sarkin was a successful North Shore chiropractor living a normal life with his wife and child. Then came a stroke, surgery, progress, more challenges, and his emergence as an artist. Now his work is being featured in the DeCordova Museum's prestigious Annual exhibit.
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.
``I'm too busy to clean up," Sarkin explains after taking the call. ``I'm seriously driven."
When he was a chiropractor, before the stroke, Sarkin used to doodle between appointments. Now he can't stop drawing. In this $300-a-month room, Sarkin churns out hyperkinetic, text-splashed works on paper, canvas, gnarly wooden boards, anything.
Sarkin's metamorphosis -- from successful chiropractor to physically damaged, eccentric artist -- is a remarkable transformation, a tale that has captured the attention of Hollywood. Tom Cruise's production company owns the rights to his life story and is developing a movie.
But until this summer, Sarkin had barely registered within the art establishment. Now, at 53, he's one of 13 artists featured in the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park's prestigious Annual, an exhibit that runs through August. He also has shows in West Hollywood in July and Gloucester in August. And the DeCordova hasn't just given him wall space. His sizable installation ``Infinity's Trial " re-creates his studio in the heart of the museum's main gallery.
``I'm interested in Jon's work not because he had this weird stroke and he's this interesting, bohemian guy or because Tom Cruise gives a crap about him," says DeCordova curator Nick Capasso. ``I'm interested in him because he's creating really interesting work."
Sarkin draws spliced Cubist forms inspired by Picasso. He splatters ink like gonzo master Ralph Steadman. He scribbles the names of his favorites: Dylan, Rothko, F. Scott Fitzgerald. He also plays the merry prankster, adding flourishes -- triple quote marks, a crop of capital A's, mock slogans -- and laughs out loud as he imagines an art wonk trying to interpret the obscure markings.
What does his art mean?
``It really doesn't mean anything," Sarkin says. ``If you want meaning, read The Wall Street Journal. My art is simply a diary of my experience."
That experience began with the life-altering medical problems that, at 35, nearly killed him. In 1988, Sarkin suddenly developed tinnitus, a ringing in his ears that he remembers as ``a fire alarm that won't go off." A blood vessel in his head was pushing against an acoustic nerve. The next fall, he underwent a risky surgery to alleviate the condition.
A day later, he suffered a stroke. To save him, doctors removed part of his cerebellum. Over the next few months, drifting in and out of consciousness, Sarkin suffered through a heart attack, a bleeding ulcer, and pneumonia.
``He looked like the pictures you see of Holocaust survivors," said John Abramson, his longtime doctor. ``He was emaciated, as sick as you can be. I thought he was going to die."
Slowly, in rehab, Sarkin learned to eat, walk, and speak again. He and his wife, Kim Sarkin, were encouraged enough by his progress to have a second child, Robin, in 1991, and Caroline in 1994. (A son, Curtis, was born in 1988.) Then Sarkin stopped improving. Today he struggles to keep his thoughts straight. He has bouts of depression and trouble with his balance. He sees double and has little strength on his left side.
The stroke altered Sarkin in another way. It opened, he likes to say, quoting Aldous Huxley, his ``doors of perception." To him, blues and reds and yellows burned brighter, as if amplified.
``One part of this is probably organic, related to the stroke and what it did to his emotive behavior and energy level," theorizes Dr. Louis Caplan, a Harvard Medical School professor of neurology who has not been involved in Sarkin's case. ``Part of it is psychological, the physical change of not being able to do his occupation, having time on his hands, and maybe giving him an opportunity to do what he wanted to do anyway."
Billy Ray, a screenwriter (``Flightplan," ``Shattered Glass") whose research has led to 18 revisions of a script for Cruise's company, is more direct. He believes Sarkin was always meant to be an artist and that pressure to establish a legitimate career kept him from his true destiny.
``The movie will make the argument that this is the guy he was supposed to be," says Ray. ``That other version of him was purely a social construct."
``He had been doing his art a little bit, and then all of a sudden it became his job," says Jane Sarkin, his sister. ``I think it saved him."
Capasso, the DeCordova curator, has always championed ``outsider" art, created by the untrained. In Sarkin's work, he says, he sees links to Picasso, cartoonist R. Crumb, and the 19th-century French philosopher artists who mixed text with images.
Earl McGrath, who will show Sarkin's work at his West Hollywood gallery, doesn't cite art history in explaining what drew him to Sarkin's work. ``I like the energy, I like the movement," he says.
To move Sarkin's art to the DeCordova, Capasso and an assistant stuffed it into a dozen green plastic garbage bags. Capasso had a 12-by-16-foot room built in the museum, the walls papered top to bottom with Sarkin's drawings.
The installation's title, ``Infinity's Trial," refers to a Bob Dylan lyric and Sarkin's own need to create.
``Part of my problem, my psychopathology, is I never think I have enough," the artist explains. ``I want to have enough stuff for 10 shows. I want to have enough stuff that if I have infinity shows, I have enough for infinity shows. I'm obsessive-compulsive. I think making art is more productive than washing your hands a thousand times a day."
Sarkin says part of him finds the idea of his selling art ridiculous. He calls it ``the great rock 'n' roll swindle" -- a Sex Pistols reference -- as he tosses a canvas to the side of the studio. A few minutes later, he admits he wants to make a mark, to be remembered as an artist long after he's gone.
The DeCordova show comes more than 10 years after his first big break, when his sister Jane, longtime features editor at Vanity Fair, suggested he send drawings to a friend of hers at The New Yorker. When they were published there, it led to a 1997 profile in Gentleman's Quarterly, which Cruise read.
``I want this DeCordova show to be a step to something else," says Jane Deering, Sarkin's art dealer.
In fact, Deering, who splits her time between London and Cape Ann, suggested to Sarkin the day the DeCordova show opened that he might need another dealer, one in the area all year. Sarkin wasn't interested. He likes her loyalty and support.
``You know what I told her?" Sarkin recounts. `` `Don't give me that ``I'm Dorothy the meek and mild." ' . . . I can take care of myself. If I need backup, I'm going to get backup."
Inside Sarkin's installation, Curtis, 18, picked up a notebook on a table. Kim reached for it, turned the pages, and sighed.
``It's full," she says, ``and I just got that book a week ago."
Kim doesn't try to put a Hollywood spin on her marriage. ``It isn't easy," she says. ``He does the dishes and takes out the trash, and he's the person I go to when I need to talk about anything. But honestly, I shoulder everything."
That includes his waves of depression. Why stay together? ``If it feels wrong, you don't do it. If it feels right, you keep doing it."
Leaning against his cane, Sarkin surveyed the gallery and smiled.
``This exhibit is not my studio. But it works," he said, his voice rising. ``Look at these people looking through my stuff."
He was asked if this is what he'd imagined the show would be like.
``I'm doing an end-zone dance now. You ever see that movie `Jerry Maguire'? I'm Cuba Gooding on the big play. They showed me the money. I'm gloating. This is the debutante ball, the cotillion. As long as I'm on the red carpet, I'm OK."
How, the former chiropractor was asked, did it feel to see his work in a museum?
For the first time, he didn't speak. He pumped his right arm and mouthed the word ``yes."
Geoff Edgers can be reached at gedgers@globe.com. 
