Warning: This isn’t your grandma’s art puff-piece. It’s messy. It’s raw. It’s devotion incarnate. If you’re obsessed with art like I am, like your whole electricity runs on pigment, then welcome home to your muse.
Some people go to church, and some go to the easel. And if you’ve ever lost sleep to sketching, written poems at 4 a.m. because your brain wouldn’t shut up, or dropped the last ₹200 you had on paints instead of food, you know what I mean: art is a religion. The Muse is a hungry goddess, and she demands sacrifices.
This isn’t a “starving artist” cliché. This is a hall of saints, sinners, and psychos who gave up their bodies, sanity, freedom, even their lives for art. We’re talking volcano martyrs, blue junkies, back-broken ceiling crawlers, dot hallucination queens. They didn’t just create; they bled creation.
So light a candle, strap in, and prepare yourself for devotion in its rawest, weirdest, most unhinged forms.
Robert Landsburg: The volcano martyr.
On May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens erupted in Washington. While everyone else ran, photographer Robert Landsburg stood his ground. He shot roll after roll of film, watching the pyroclastic flow thunder down. Knowing he wouldn’t survive, he rewound the film, sealed the camera, and lay on top of it.
When rescuers found his body, the film was intact. His last gift to the world was vision, pressed into celluloid under his ribs.
Knowing there was nothing he could do for himself, he chose to do something for posterity.
Huckberry
He didn’t die with his art. He died for it.
Johannes Vermeer: Bankrupt for blue.
Seventeenth-century painter Johannes Vermeer had a drug, and its name was ultramarine. This pigment, ground from lapis lazuli mined in Afghanistan, cost more than gold. Most artists saved it for highlights, halos, sacred robes. Vermeer? He slathered it in shadows, tucked it into folds of cloth, poured it into walls.
The man was broke, his family literally had to sell his estate to pay debts when he died. But his blues still glow like they were painted yesterday. He chose colour over bread.
Ultramarine is a color illustrious, beautiful, and most perfect, beyond all the other colors.
Cennino Cennini, The Craftsman’s Handbook
Vincent van Gogh: The candle-hat painter.
He painted over 900 works, sold one. He ate paint sometimes. It is said that he strapped candles to his hat so he could paint in the dark. He starved himself so he could afford more canvas.
His brushwork is the visual equivalent of screaming into the night and hoping someone hears you. Nobody did in his lifetime. Now he’s the patron saint of misunderstood chaos kids everywhere.
I put my heart and soul into my work, and I have lost my mind in the process.
Van Gogh
Sylvia Plath: The poet who burned at 4 a.m.
Sylvia Plath woke before dawn, when her kids were still asleep, to pour lines into her typewriter like bloodletting. The Ariel poems came in a furious burst, a white-hot channeling of breakdown into verse. She was writing herself out of existence and into immortality.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
Sylvia Plath, Mad Girl’s Love Song
I lift my lids and all is born again.
Her body crumbled. The words never did.
Ludwig van Beethoven: The deaf symphonist.
What’s music to a man who can’t hear? Beethoven lost his hearing in his thirties, but refused silence. He composed the Ninth Symphony entirely deaf, scribbling notes into a void only he could imagine.
At its premiere, he stood on stage, unaware of the roaring ovation until a soloist turned him around to see the clapping. Imagine that: music too loud for ears to contain.
Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.
eethoven
Artemisia Gentileschi: Rage as a palette.
Raped at 17, tortured during the trial (thumbscrews to “prove” she was telling the truth), Gentileschi painted her fury into masterpieces. Look at Judith Slaying Holofernes, Judith’s face is hers, the man’s is her rapist’s. Blood gushes, vengeance lives on canvas.
She didn’t just survive trauma; she weaponised it into brushstrokes.
Frida Kahlo: Corset canvases.
Polio at six. A bus crash at eighteen shattered her spine, pelvis, collarbone. She lived corseted in pain. But she mounted a mirror above her bed so she could paint self-portraits flat on her back. Her medical corsets? Painted with hearts, fetuses, cracked columns.
Frida turned agony into colour. Every canvas is a wound singing.
I paint flowers so they will not die.
Frida Kahlo
Franz Kafka: The invisible novelist.
By day: insurance clerk. By night: chronicler of existential dread. Kafka published almost nothing in his lifetime and begged his friend Max Brod to burn everything after his death. Brod ignored him. That’s why we know The Trial and Metamorphosis.
He died unseen, convinced his words were unworthy. We call him a prophet now.
Michelangelo: Broken spine for God’s ceiling.
The Sistine Chapel ceiling wasn’t divine bliss. It was four years of scaffolding torture. Michelangelo painted hunched, twisted, staring upwards until paint dripped into his eyes and his body warped.
My stomach’s squashed under my chin, my beard’s
pointing at heaven, my brain’s crushed in a casket,
my breast twists like a harpy’s. My brush,
above me all the time, dribbles paint
so my face makes a fine floor for droppings!
Michelangelo, To Giovanni da Pistoia When the Author Was Painting the Vault of the Sistine Chapel
Beauty demanded his bones. He gave them.
Oscar Wilde: Art as life, life as punishment.
Oscar Wilde lived like an artwork: velvet suits, razor wit, devotion to beauty. But when Victorian England couldn’t handle his love for men, he was imprisoned for “gross indecency.” He lost his health, reputation, and freedom.
I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.
Oscar Wilde
He died in exile, broke, broken but still glittering in prose.
Henry Darger: Janitor of worlds.
Nobody knew he existed. He was a Chicago janitor. When he died, his landlords found a 15,000-page novel with hundreds of words and paintings: The Story of the Vivian Girls. He built universes in secret, never showing a soul. Devotion in absolute solitude.
Yayoi Kusama: Dots as destiny.
Hallucinations haunted her: fields of dots swallowing her whole. She checked herself into a psychiatric hospital, where she still lives. From there, she creates infinity rooms and pumpkin fields. She turned psychosis into beauty.
If it were not for art, I would have killed myself a long time ago.
Yayoi Kusama
Marina Abramović: Body as canvas.
In Rhythm 0 (1974), Marina laid out 72 objects, from a rose to a loaded gun, and let the audience do whatever they wanted to her motionless body. They cut her, stripped her, even aimed the gun. Six hours of surrender, pure danger as art.
Decades later came The Artist Is Present (MoMA, 2010): she sat silently for 736 hours, staring at strangers one by one. People sobbed, cracked, transformed. She never broke; until her former love, Ulay, appeared. After decades apart, she finally reached for his hands, both of them in tears.
In the end, all I can offer is my own presence.
Marina Abramović
Art wasn’t performance. It was risk.
Sappho: Fragments of flame.
Ancient Greek poetess of love and longing. Most of her work is lost, burned or erased by centuries of scandal. What survives are fragments: torn stanzas about women, love, and desire. She risked her reputation and legacy to write her truth.
Claude Monet: Blind devotion.
Monet wasn’t just painting flowers. He was painting time itself; the shimmer of dawn, the hush of dusk, the way water eats light. And he was obsessed. For the last 30 years of his life, he returned again and again to the water lilies in his garden at Giverny, painting them in every season, every light, every mood.
But here’s the twist: he was going blind. Cataracts clouded his eyes, turning blues muddy, yellows overwhelming. Doctors begged him to stop. Instead, he painted through the distortion, producing canvases that blur into abstraction before abstraction was even a thing. His final works, those massive panels of lilies, look like visions half-remembered, worlds dissolving into colour.
Every day I discover even more beautiful things. It is intoxicating me, and I want to paint it all – my head is bursting.
Claude Monet
When he could no longer trust his eyes, he trusted his devotion. Imagine painting water lilies you can’t even see clearly, still desperate to capture the light slipping away. That’s not just an obsession. That’s faith.
Why do we kneel to the martyrs of the muse?
What binds them? They weren’t safe. They weren’t sensible. They were chosen: by paint, by pigment, by sound, by word. Art devoured them, and they let it.
I’m not saying you should throw yourself into a volcano with your DSLR, but I get it. I’ve skipped meals for designs. I’ve written until my knuckles ached. You too, maybe. That’s why we love these martyrs: they remind us that creation is dangerous, and worth it.
So next time you’re hunched at 3 a.m. sketching under a dying bulb, remember: you’re not alone. You’re part of a lineage of glorious, devoted lunatics who thought art was worth everything. And it is.
Want more reckless devotion, midnight brain dumps, and the kind of hot takes that could get me exiled from group chats? Catch us at Her Campus at MUJ for the full vibe. This chaos sermon was scribbled by Niamat Dhillon at HCMUJ, who has probably sacrificed more meals to notebooks than to the mess.