It was actually Sarkin's younger sister, Jane, who "discovered" him several years ago. "She said, 'Do you still do those doodles you used to do [while talking] on the phone? Well, I think your doodles are really good. You should send them in to The New Yorker magazine,'" Sarkin recalls. "I said, 'Hey, what the hell. It's like a lark. I'll send them in and get a rejection.' Two weeks later they call me up and say, 'We like your drawings and we want to buy some.'" Since then, Sarkin's works have been exhibited in New York, Gloucester, and Rockport, Mass., and he was profiled in the January 1997 issue of GQ magazine, which also reprinted
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| Dr. Greenbaum's Cadillac, 1993 |
Along with Sarkin's emerging artistic gifts have come physical disabilities. He walks with a cane, sees double, is deaf in one ear, and must speak slowly and deliberately to avoid slurring his words.
The double vision actually is an asset for an artist, Sarkin says. "If you ever look at something, and it sort of looks like another thing, that phenomenon for me has been increased." Many of Sarkin's works, in fact, look like they were created by someone with a fly's multiple, fragmented vision.
But the after-effects of the stroke that Sarkin believes have enriched his art have strained his family life. "It has changed my relationship with my wife and my children tremendously," he says. "Usually you can go to the beach, you can run after your kids, carry your kids on your shoulder, go skiing with your kids, carry your kids up the stairs..." Sarkin can't. He says his three children, ages two, five and nine, only partly understand his condition - "in the ways that kids do."
Almost daily, Sarkin does something that frustrates his wife, Kim, because it's so irrational. He says, "She's like, 'Jon, what am I going to do with you?' I'm like, 'Kim, what am I going to do with me?'" Even around strangers and acquaintances, Sarkin's lack of an internal censor often gets him into trouble. "I say things without really thinking about the consequences of what I say." He also often takes things that others say literally that were intended otherwise. One time, for instance, a relative who wondered if he had enough money for a cab ride, asked him, "How's your financial situation?" Well, Sarkin said, he had recently met with his financial advisor...
Sarkin speaks slowly because of his disability, but when he explains his art, ideas come tumbling out of him. "I get these motifs
tail fins or cactuses or the Chrysler Building or King Kongand I just work them to death," he says. "For some reason, I like Superman, and I just go crazy doing pictures of Superman. I like the blues, and a lot of my pieces revolve around the blues. The movie Taxi Driver, for some reason, just hits me... I made a sculpture that's a cab door, and in the cab door there's a tape recording loop. I recorded the part of the movie that says, 'Are you talking to me?' There's an actual cab door that says, 'Are you talking to me? Are you talking to me? Are you talking to me?'... I'm into fish. I've probably made 20 different drawings of fish. Cactuses, I've probably made 50. Cadillac fins, I've probably made 20."
Why tail fins? Why cactuses? Why fish? "I like the way they look," says Sarkin. Why Taxi Driver? "I like the way it sounds. I like the way it feels. I like the way [tail fins] make me feel. I like the associations with when I was a kid and my parents had a car like that. I just like the whole American 'can do' thing of the fifties, which is epitomized by the Cadillac."
Sarkin says, "I'm very aesthetically drawn to certain things. Often, I'll thumb through a magazine and say, 'I like this, I like this, I don't like that.' The things I like I tear out and put up on the wall of my studio, and I'll get my inspiration." Continued. . .
Copyright 1997 The Pennsylvania Gazette | Last modified Mon, Jun 9, 1997