Haitian artist Larose describes the earthquake in vivid images

**Great slideshow here**

Haiti earthquake through eyes of artist

By Steven Sternberg, USA Today

For days, Hugues Larose lay quietly in his bunk aboard the Navy hospital ship Comfort, asking little of his doctors and nurses, a peaceful soul aboard a vessel echoing with the cries of shattered, tormented people.

Larose was one of the first patients brought aboard the Comfort when it reached Port-au-Prince eight days after the Jan. 12 earthquake. After a few days on board, he asked for a pencil and paper "to give birth to my thoughts." Using the aluminum clipboard hanging beside his bed, he began to sketch a woman crushed by a telephone pole, a survivor sitting dazed in the street, limbs jutting from pancaked buildings, frantic people pouring into the streets, and ships, including the Comfort, anchored offshore.

"My fingers are influenced by the earthquake, all collapsed houses and dead," Larose says. "Survivors look so different."

In an instant, the simple black-and-white sketch carried the Comfort's doctors and nurses ashore to witness the immediate aftermath of letremblement de terre— "the trembling of the earth" — that in a few minutes flattened Haiti's densely populated capital, killing 250,000 people and injuring more. It allowed them to experience the tragedy, not through a camera lens, but through the eyes of a survivor who happened to be an artist.

See article and slideshow here

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