Victims of brain trauma sometimes report intense creative urges after recovery.
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Unknown to him there was a man across the ocean who knew exactly what was going on, because years earlier he also had experienced a kind of creative metamorphosis after a stroke.
Jon Sarkin, who in his old life was a successful chiropractor in Gloucester, Mass., was stricken at the age of 35, as he prepared to tee off during a golf game.
"I felt this intense explosive flood in my head, you know, and it just changed everything," he said. "Sounds were different, things looked different. I knew that something had cataclysmically changed."
Surgery led to a stroke that necessitated more surgery. And after months of difficult rehabilitation, his creative compulsions also began with multiple drawings of the same object.
"I remember I came home from the hospital and I started to draw a picture of a cactus over and over and over again," Sarkin said.
If the world suddenly seemed inhospitable to Sarkin, the tempest in his brain flung out words and images in such a raw and unrestrained way that his drawings now fill an entire storage room in Gloucester.
His wife, who preferred not to be interviewed, has stayed with him all these years, and aided by his disability income, they have raised three children. In the outside world, there was a recognition that some of Sarkin's better pieces were marketable.
His works have sold for as much as $20,000 and have been published in the New Yorker magazine and displayed in galleries in New York and Boston. But one of the key after-effects of Sarkin's new personality was also the feeling that no one else could truly understand his changes, or the demons he faced.
And that is where a third person enters this extraordinary story. In an act of desperation, Tommy McHugh, the artist living in Liverpool, began writing letter after letter to doctors whose names he found in articles and books.
In the winter of 2005, a letter from McHugh arrived on the desk of Dr. Alice Flaherty, one of the country's leading neurologists, at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
"I just thought, here's a live one," Flaherty said. "He just burst out of the envelope."
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