On the compulsion to make art

Peatery in Drenthe, Vincent van Gogh, 1883

In the 1930s, people on the island where we live would go down to the old coal pit after thunderstorms, the village historian told me. They went looking for pink fragments of stone, the size of a finger—fossils after a kind of 120-million-year-old squid that had been hauled from the ground by the miners. But the villagers thought the pink stones were the arrowheads of lightning that had struck, and they would put the lightning tips they gathered under their beds to keep themselves safe. Lighting will not strike the same place twice.

There was still a thin drizzle in the air when, after the next rain storm, our four-year-old and I parked our bicycle next to the coal pit. There was no life in sight: it was all sooth and sand, a black desert. A century after the production had closed down, not a single straw of grass. The rain, pouring in thin streams, had carved the black sand into a labyrinth of ravines.

We walked the labyrinth toward the sea. I told Maud that this is what the earth must have looked like 500 million years ago, before life seeped and wriggled out of the sea and conquered land.

Rolling down the walls of the ravines were scraps of coal, few of them larger than my thumb. The village historian had told me that a sculptor, a stone cutter, who lived nearby, used to go down here in the winters to collect these scraps of coal to heat his house. In the early 1960s, when he was in his twenties with two kids and few prospects of selling his art, he had been brought to such financial despair that he could be seen out here with a wheelbarrow, crawling on his knees.

In the years after I heard about the sculptor scavenging stone coal by the sea, I began collecting information about him. When artists who had known him came into the gallery where I worked, I would interview them. I looked for pictures of his sculptures. In our archives, I found a self-published book he had made and read what he had written.

These, our first years on the island, were, as I’ve written elsewhere, difficult years. Johanna and I had two young children, whom we raised at home. To have time to write, I would go up