Daniel Jenkins Was Going Blind. He Picked Up a Sharpie and Never Put It Down
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- 23/09/2026
Most artists talk about finding their medium like it was a discovery, a happy accident, a material that just clicked. Daniel Jenkins found his while recovering from brain surgery, mid-way through a personal challenge that had nothing to do with sharpies at all.
“Entertaining the idea of losing your eyesight, or even death, is a big motivator. It forced me to accept that our time here is limited, and if there is something you have a desire to do, the only time to do it is right now.”
He’d just finished art school when the vision problems started. Multiple tests, multiple doctors and eventually an answer nobody wants, a brain tumour pressing on his optic nerves, slowly taking his sight. He’s said, in his own words, that entertaining the idea of losing his eyesight, or even his life, became a strange kind of motivator, forcing him to accept that time is limited and if you want to do something, the only real time to do it is now. Surgery removed the tumour and restored his sight fully. Most people would have exhaled and moved on. Daniel set himself a different kind of challenge instead, one full piece of art, every single day, for an entire year.
“The monotony of the challenge is what led me to picking up a sharpie after a few months.”
He’s been candid about why. He believes, subconsciously, that near brush with blindness and death became the driving force behind his need for constant output, a way of proving to himself that the work still mattered enough to keep making. Somewhere in the monotony of that year-long challenge, a few months in, he picked up a Sharpie almost by accident. It stuck. It’s remained his primary medium ever since, an ordinary marker turned into the exact tool that lets him build faces out of tangled black lines, portraits that read as both meticulously controlled and completely unleashed at once.
“Whatever comes out at that end point is Art to me.”
His work sits deliberately between two things that shouldn’t belong together. Classical figurative training on one side, raw abstract expressionism on the other, merged into portraits that stay recognisable as faces while somehow refusing to sit still. His two biggest influences aren’t stylistic reference points so much as ideas he’s borrowed the underlying logic from, Rothko and Caravaggio, not for their technique, but for the thinking beneath their approach. He’s described the creative process itself almost mathematically, our minds hand us equations and art is simply the answer that comes out the other side. Marcel Duchamp‘s equation, he’s noted, was about expanding what counts as art at all. Daniel’s own equation seems to be about proving that control and chaos aren’t actually opposites, just two ends of the same line.
“Create as much as possible, no matter your situation. Don’t let circumstance or doubt stop you.”
Homiens‘ curators have described his work as bold marker strokes that fuse figurative clarity with abstract energy, producing portraits that feel both compelling and deeply searching, an intricate web of black lines building recognisable form while giving each subject a palpable sense of layered depth. That tension, precision fighting freedom, discipline wrestling instinct, is exactly what makes his portraits so hard to look away from.
Music runs underneath much of what he makes. He’s spoken about how much of his inspiration comes from everyday life and other art forms, film, books, but mostly music and he’s built an entire series of portraits devoted to jazz musicians. Miles Davis and Hermeto Pascoal have been on rotation while he works, alongside a portrait of Sarah Vaughan, their improvisational spirit clearly bleeding straight into his own instinctive mark-making.
“The medium is very unforgiving, but I do feel that it also forces innovation and improvisation. If I make a mistake, it forces me to find a way to now make that line correct some kind of way.”
In the past few years alone he’s exhibited at Kente Royal Gallery in New York, Scott H. Kaplan Gallery in New Jersey, the Montclair Art Museum multiple times, and Bakerhouse Gallery in Graz, Austria, where he was named a Scan.Art Emerging Artists finalist. He won Emerging Artist of the Year at ADC Fine Art in Ohio and his collectors now include Spike Lee, Robert “Kool” Bell of Kool & The Gang, Eric Roberson, Posdnuos of De La Soul and the late former Miss America Cheslie Kryst. This is a genuinely serious collector base for an artist working primarily in Sharpie and it tells you the work is landing exactly the way it’s meant to.
“I was initially doing oil paintings, way more traditional or standard looking work. I had gotten used to the generic responses to my work. The Sharpie sketches were just a personal project, I never really intended to show them to anyone.”
Failure, he’s said, is very important to his process, the only way to discover anything genuinely new is to take risks and risk necessarily means failing sometimes. His advice to other creatives is blunt and entirely lived-in. Create as much as possible, no matter your circumstance. Don’t let doubt or situation stop you. Coming from someone who nearly lost his sight and responded by committing to art every single day for a year, that advice carries a weight most people’s version of the same sentence simply doesn’t.
INTERVIEW:
CHERYL: You picked up the Sharpie almost by accident, a few months into your one-piece-a-day challenge. Do you remember the actual first piece you made with it and did you know in that moment it was going to become your primary medium, or did that only become clear looking back?
DANIEL JENKINS: “Oddly enough I do remember the first piece. I was doing one drawing a day, and I love drawing people so every drawing was a portrait. This particular day I saw online that it was Jim Morrison(of The Doors)’s birthday so my drawing for that day was going to be a portrait of him. They’re actually one of my favorite bands and his biography is a really good read for anyone in the Arts. I was posting all my drawings at the time in my Instagram stories, and the highlights are still on my page from that time. I did about 3 or 4 portraits of him with the Sharpie that day, real rough abstract ones, but I was working out how I could still show his likeness with just the stark black line of a sharpie. By the 3rd or 4th one I slowly was getting there.”
CHERYL: You’ve said Rothko and Caravaggio influence you through their underlying ideas rather than their technique. If you had to describe what each of them actually gave you, not visually, but conceptually, what would you say Rothko handed you and what would you say Caravaggio handed you?
DANIEL JENKINS: “Rothko definitely just expanded my idea of art. He showed me that the experience the viewer gets from seeing a piece is more powerful than anything the artist can show visually. If you can connect on a deeper almost subconscious level you can bypass all intellectual understanding when it comes to how art is experienced. With Caravaggio it was a little less subconscious. He was very thematic with his compositions, and the difference in values were taken to an extreme level which made each piece that much more dynamic and theatrical. With the technique of Chiaroscuro, if you squint he almost cuts a painting into a visible section and a section of pure darkness. So with working in Sharpie right now I am basically forced to do that simply by default. He made me look at a piece as just the interplay of light and dark.”
CHERYL: Your jazz portrait series pulls directly from musicians like Miles Davis and Hermeto Pascoal, artists famous for improvising in real time. When you’re mid-piece, is there a moment where you’re genuinely improvising the same way they would, not knowing where the next line is going until it’s already down?
DANIEL JENKINS: “Yes, but it’s never really fun when that is happening to be honest. The medium is very unforgiving but I do feel that it also forces innovation and improvisation. If I make a mistake it forces me to find a way to now make that line correct some kind of way. Speaking of Jazz there’s a good interview online where Herbie Hancock is saying that’s how Miles Davis thought. He’s telling a story where he is playing with Miles’ band and he hits a completely wrong chord in the middle of Miles’ solo. Instead of Miles hearing it as a mistake, he pauses and plays a few notes that now make Herbie’s wrong chord correct. It’s a good mindset to have, though with music it’s much easier to keep playing and have the audience forget, with a piece of art you could potentially completely ruin it, and I have people pose a lot and work from life so that’s even worse if you mess up a portrait someone one is posing for. So far I think I’ve gotten really good at improvising and adapting to potential ‘mistakes’ when working.”
CHERYL: You did one full piece of art every single day for a year, no exceptions. Was there a specific day in that year, good or bad, where you nearly didn’t make the day’s piece and what actually got you to the canvas anyway?
DANIEL JENKINS: “Most of these were in a sketchbook so even if I was working or on vacation I could always make time to take out my sketchbook and do a piece. Later I added in some color, the color red with watercolor, so that did make it a little more difficult. But after months of doing this it actually just became part of my routine, if I knew I had a busy day I sometimes would just wake up early and do my piece before my day even started just so it wouldn’t mess up my streak. I started to just schedule it into my day like anything else.”
CHERYL: You’ve said you don’t factor in how people will receive the work while you’re making it. Has there ever been a piece where the audience’s reaction genuinely surprised you, something they saw in it that you hadn’t consciously put there yourself?
DANIEL JENKINS: “Yes, a friend of mine happened to see my sketchbook, with all the sharpie portraits and her reaction was the best reaction I’ve ever gotten to my artwork. I was initially doing oil paintings, way more traditional or standard looking work. I went to art school so everyone knew I was an artist, so I had gotten used to the generic responses to my work. The Sharpie sketches were just a personal project of mine, I never really intended to put them on canvas or show them to anyone. Her reaction to the Sharpie portraits was so genuine and passionate I had to take note. I would show my oil paintings to people and never once got that kind of reaction. So that’s the one time a reaction to my work did affect me, but it was only because it was such a genuine reaction I could tell it wasn’t the generic response artists just get used to. This was before any exhibitions or collectors or anything, she actually asked me to do one for her, a David Bowie portrait, so that was the first one I technically sold, even though I didn’t ask for any money for it. I was just happy that these pieces I initially thought of as just a personal project for myself meant that much to someone else.”
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