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On Friday, WBUR will publish my story about efforts to preserve the legacy of the late Jon Sarkin. The artist died at his Gloucester studio last summer at the age of 71. When he was 35, he suffered a stroke during surgery to repair tinnitus; doctors ended up removing part of the left side of his brain. Sarkin emerged from the ordeal with an obsessive desire to create art. Some 20,000 of his works are now stored in the studio where he once spent most of his waking hours.

Sarkin is often described as an “outsider artist,” a term generally applied to artists without formal training or connections to the art world. Because of a historic focus on art created by psychiatric patients, spiritualists and children, “outsider art” can sometimes imply a savant-like quality, and therefore a lack of sophistication or self-awareness, on the part of its practitioners. There are potential pitfalls to anointing someone an outsider artist, but there is value, too, in recognizing work produced outside the art world’s way of thinking and doing business.

I found Sarkin’s work immediately appealing. He drew in a flat, cartoon-like style that was surreal and deeply expressive. And it was funny, with text that offered a kind of meta-commentary about the work, a literal stream of consciousness riffing humorously on language and art. Sarkin’s work was playful, in touch with a childlike urge to put marker to paper, but also quite sophisticated in its formal characteristics and wry self-awareness.

In one series of drawings that I was shown, Sarkin experimented openly with abstraction by drawing fish that became increasingly unfishlike. An angular shape with three eyes was still, somehow, a fish. A square with three sets of teeth was less so, but it was surrounded by the word “fish” written dozens of times. “Funny!, You say; This looks nothin like a fish,” Sarkin declared in blocky text on the picture’s right-hand corner. “But by writing ‘fish’ over + over, this drawing is transformed into a fish.”

My encounter with Sarkin’s work made me consider how we decide what art is “good.” I’m used to walking into a gallery and being able to read a plaque that explains an artist’s meaning. I enjoy the intellectual exercise of making sense of art, and appreciate when artists are able to communicate a message in their work. But Sarkin never wrote an artist statement. Does that matter? Should it?

The short answer, for me, is no. In Sarkin’s case, it’s easy to muster evidence to support this conclusion. Colin Rhodes, an outsider art expert I interviewed for my piece, has written extensively about Sarkin’s work. He explicitly connects Sarkin to his artistic contemporaries. “[Sarkin] draws his creative imagery from the depths of his unconscious and uses the kinds of automatic methods beloved of Surrealism, Neo-Dada and the Beat generation writers,” Rhodes wrote in an article published in the journal “Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences.” “Working compulsively and obsessively, Sarkin has produced a large body of visual art and textual work that is both profound in its accumulated cultural messaging and truly arresting visually.”

For me, it’s still a bit of a mystery. I appreciate when art makes me think, which Sarkin’s does. But first, it needs to make me feel. Sarkin’s work has stayed with me. It shifts my perceptions, altering – pleasantly, unsettlingly – the way I see the world. I get a visceral sensation when I look at it: like falling down the rabbit hole, like stepping through a portal, like falling into the vast unknown. That’s how I know it’s good.