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On the compulsion to make art - by Henrik Karlsson

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The work was what connected him to himself.

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…

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