Nicholas Jones and I met in 2017 when he invited me to the exhibition of his new Aurora paintings at the Crane Kalman Gallery in London. He had seen my book Aurora: In Search of the Northern Lights and realised that we had a shared passion—the Arctic, the light and the aurora.

In my book, I talked about aurora in art. Before photography, it was only through art that the phenomenon could be captured at all. Historical works in the sixteenth century show the aurora in the superstitious light of t...