Marilyn Church: Courtroom Artist Seeks Larger Frame
Along with the flag and the hot dog, one of the things that binds Americans together is a great criminal trial.
We scan our newspapers and glue ourselves to our radios and TV sets, lusting for coverage of what may be the most gripping form of entertainment since they threw the Christians to the lions: everyone remembers where they were when the O.J. verdict was announced.
But cameras have only recently been admitted to state trials - they are still banned from Federal courts - and for years we have relied on the courtroom artist to bring us the faces of the defendant, judge, jury, prosecution, defense, and - if still among us - the victim.
High-Profile Dossier
Marilyn Church, who lives in Amagansett, is perhaps our foremost courtroom illustrator. For the past 23 years she has covered the East Coast's most sensational trials for The New York Times, the Associated Press, ABC-TV, and for magazines including Newsweek, Time, and Mademoiselle.
The catalogue of cases she has sketched reads like a rogue's gallery of crimes that have forged a fascinated nation into an unempaneled jury.
Under the heading "High-Profile Cases" in her dossier we find Karan Anne Quinlan, David Berkowitz, Baby M., Hurricane Carter, John Hinckley, Jean Harris, Amy Fisher, Katie Beers, Bernard Goetz, Robert Chambers, Joel Steinberg, the Central Park jogger, Leona Helmsley, and Sheik Rahman of the World Trade Center bombing, to name but a few.
Mobsters And Politicos
Her "Mobsters" file contains such cases as the Pizza Connection and the court appearances of John Gotti, Carlo Gambino, and other Mafia figures.
"Political" trials include the Watergate-related Mitchell-Stans case and the Abby Hoffman and Abscam cases. Her "Show Business" gigs have starred Brooke Shields, Jackie O., Mick Jagger, Billy Joel, Yoko Ono, and Woody Allen.
And - despite the presence of cameras - she drew the O.J. trial for Ladies Home Journal.
Something Darker
"I'm absolutely fascinated by criminal trials, and love drawing these crises-in-progress," Ms. Church said. "What makes these characters step out of their ordinary lives and do these extraordinary things?"
"The Jean Harris case, to me, was the most gripping. How could a functioning headmistress of a girls' school with her background drive all the way from Virginia to Scarsdale, N.Y., to kill her lover?"
"Maybe she was in drug withdrawal, or high on speed. Maybe Robert Chambers and O.J. were high, too. Maybe it's all about drugs and sex, but I don't think so. I think they're driven by something darker."
Tentative Studies
The artist usually sides with the prosecution, she said.
"I think there's generally a good reason the defendant is where he is. I was totally caught up in the Robert Chambers trial. I really thought he was going to get off; it hung by a hair. What a travesty that would have been, almost as bad as O.J."
Ms. Church was born in Flushing, the third of five children of a Protestant urologist and a Catholic nurse. Perhaps rebelling against her conservative upbringing, she decided to become an artist, and compromised with her security-minded mother by entering Pratt Institute's School of Fashion Design.
She lasted one semester - fashion design was "too constricting." Another compromise led to an equally suffocating semester in art education.
Nine To Five And After
Finally she achieved her goal by completing Pratt's fine arts program (Robert Richenburg of Springs was one of her professors). After studying at the Art Students League, she went on to graduate work at the University of Indiana, where she married a writer bent on producing the Great American Novel.
When they moved to Greenwich Village in the '60s, "One of us had to work," Ms. Church said, "so I got a 9-to-5 job in fashion illustration, and nearly went crazy."
She quit after six months, became a freelance illustrator for various publications, and continued painting in her free time.
The First Trials
Ten years went by. A son, Zach, now an environmentalist in Washington, was born. The Great American Novel languished, the feminist movement came along, and when Ms. Church acquired an agent to reshape her career, the assertiveness of the gesture broke up an already shaky marriage.
In 1973 a lawyer friend suggested she might like drawing courtroom scenes. The feminist fought her way into a mercy-killing trial in Mineola, using every feminine wile at her disposal.
Next she tackled a high-profile trial in which the Queens District Attorney was under indictment, with a future Police Commissioner, Robert McGuire, acting as his defense attorney.
"I had no training, and was scared out of my mind," Ms. Church said. "It was an off-day of jury selection, so I was able to walk in and get a seat behind the other artists. Working with colored charcoals, I kind of copied what they were doing."
"I was hooked in a minute. It was an absolutely mesmerizing dream, after the strictures of fashion. I immediately took my drawings to all the TV stations, and because these two big trials were going on simultaneously, they needed back-up artists."
"I started work right away, and a month later was drawing the Mitchell/Stans case for The New York Times. It was fascinating. I had a front-row seat at the best drama in town."
Memory And Emotion
A courtroom artist must be blessed with split-second eye-to-hand coordination and a photographic memory, said Ms. Church. Arraignments and sentencings may be over in three minutes, the defendant's back to the artist the whole time. She has to capture his expression as he leaves the court.
"I had less than a minute to draw David Berkowitz. He walked in, exploded, started screaming, and was led out. I had three sketches to do, and I'd drawn maybe 10 lines. I filled in the rest from memory."
"I also try to put my emotions into my work. There I was, sitting three feet away from the 'Son of Sam' killer, with all this heavy security in the court. There was fear in my heart and hand, and it shows in the sketch. Artists can synthesize in one drawing what it would take many photographs to convey."
Fighting The Clock
A video of Ms. Church shows her working on a long shot of the jury hearing testimony read back during the Robert Chambers trail. She has sketched the jury and the courtroom audience and is filling in the drawing with black watercolor paint, her brush racing.
"I was always fighting the clock," she said. "The picture's finished when the camera crew comes to shoot it and pulls it out of my hands. I usually have less than an hour."
"If it's a long trial, like the Johnson family will case which lasted over a year, I get to know not only the defendant's complete wardrobe and range of facial expressions, but also the judge's, the jury's, the attorneys', and the audience's."
Vanity, Thy Name Is Gotti
People are surprisingly vain about the way Ms. Church portrays them. Gene Gotti, brother of John, the Mafia boss, complained she was giving him a receding hairline.
"Facing 40 years to life, he was worried about a sketch," she said in disbelief, adding that she lowered his hairline at once. Even in court, when a Gotti speaks, people listen.
Ms. Church has had solo exhibits of her court drawings at Cafe des Artistes in Manhattan and at the Harvard Law School and the New Jersey Bar Association, among other venues.
Her drawings are in many collections, and were on view last month at Art Expo in the Javits Center.
A New Direction
After also sketching wars, disasters, shipwrecks, and fires, Ms. Church hung up her illustrator's hat two years ago to live in Amagansett year-round and devote herself full time to painting. "I don't miss the pressure of the court work," she said. "I did it for 23 years and I'm burned out."
Her paintings were first seen locally at the Bologna Landi Gallery in 1986. Since then, she has exhibited at Guild Hall, Ashawagh Hall, the Millennium Gallery, and the Elaine Benson Gallery, where a show is planned for July. She has also been in several group shows in New York City.
"The past two years have been everything I wanted: the peace and solitude to work very hard and just see what happens. Of course there's the pressure to get a show together that makes sense, but that's a constructive pressure. I want my work to be something very different, and I'm looking for a breakthrough."
Inspired By de Kooning
Willem de Kooning has been one of Ms. Church's biggest inspirations. "My works have often been described as Expressionist," she said, "but now I want to put the gesture, energy, and passion of Abstract Expressionism, which you can see in my courtroom drawings, into my new paintings."
"Art is so cool and laid-back these days, I really feel out of sync. But one of the most moving paintings I ever saw was a de Kooning."
Now into her second year of spending four days a week alone here - her second husband, Alan Applebaum, a distributor of olive oil, comes for long weekends - she feels she has made the right decision.
"It's an exhilarating struggle, and I can't not do it.
The isolation may be hard at times, but it's good for my work. And when you finally get something right, well, there's no feeling like it the world."