Suffering In Hazzard's A Thousand Naked Strangers

This world is full of many uncertainties. Some are pleasant surprises, while others become life-altering tragedies. Kevin Hazzard portrays such beautiful disasters in his book “A Thousand Naked Strangers,” which recalls his unimaginably insane encounters as an EMT and paramedic in Atlanta, Georgia. He witnessed pain and suffering, but also beauty and freedom. He claims that the chaos and unpredictability is what made his job worth doing. Just as Hazzard’s job shows how disaster brings about freedom and beauty, art conveys this relationship in a similar way. Although more well-off individuals have better access to necessary resources, in order to truly create beautiful, revolutionary works of art one must endure some form of suffering. It

He was a post-impressionist artist responsible for “his own more bold and conventional style” (“Van Gogh Gallery”). He is, of course, most famous for his painting, “Starry Night.” Van Gogh was known to be “highly emotional, lacking self-confidence, and struggling with his identity and direction” (“Van Gogh Gallery”). When he finally decided to pursue art, he had already endured many hardships. He had gone through two unhappy relationships and worked unsuccessfully as a bookstore clerk, an art salesman, and a preacher, where he was “dismissed for overzealousness” (“Van Gogh Gallery”). Throughout his entire career as an artist, he only sold one painting. He lived in poverty, and suffered from severe malnourishment and sleep deprivation. All of his sufferings sent him spiraling into “fits of madness and lucidity,” which ultimately placed him the Saint-Remy institution after cutting off his own earlobe in attempts to murder his friend and fellow artist, Gaugin (“Van Gogh Gallery”). Van Gogh’s anguish heavily influenced his art. His “fusion of form and content is powerful; dramatic, lyrically rhythmic, imaginative, and emotional,” because he was “completely absorbed in the effort to explain either his struggle against madness or his comprehension of the spiritual essence of man and nature” (“Van Gogh Gallery”). Without his struggles and his pain, Vincent Van Gogh could not be the prominent artist that he has become. His inventive style,

Such colonies house “painters, musicians, and struggling artists of all types” that “came to live and work, to perform and dance late into the night and to be surrounded by creativity” (“Oakland”). Green Day’s frontman, Billie Joe Armstrong, started in one of Oakland’s underground warehouses when he was broke and homeless. Now, Green Day is a well-known, well-loved band with twelve studio albums, two live albums, four compilation albums, four video albums, ten extended plays, four box sets, forty singles, ten promotional singles, and 39 music videos. They have sold over 85 million records worldwide (“Green Day”). Needless to say, they have certainly made their mark on the music industry. The fact that such an influential band began in an art colony shows that the creative and inspirational artists that endure financial struggling, and move into these artist warehouses, channel their hardships into beautiful, innovative works of