Courtroom Sketchers Produce Own Form of Juried Art

Except for those with regular, intimate contact with the court system--from whatever angle--most of us know about the visual life of the courtroom through movies and the work of the courtroom artist. Because cameras are still generally forbidden in courtrooms, the work of the sketch artist has become one of the last strongholds of hands-on, real-time draftsmanship in a world gone techno.

The drawings by several such artists, now on display at the Lankershim Arts Center, don’t necessarily impress with their artistic skill, by any conventional standard. The beauty is in the immediacy and what it represents. This is pragmatic art, concerned with accurate reportage but also with fast production, with working on the fly. At the same time, these artists are seeking to capture something essential, snatched from real life.

There is also a local advantage for courtroom artists in Southern California, in that the courtroom scene is sometimes peopled by the famous and the infamous. We find scenes from the trials of O.J. Simpson, Richard Ramirez, John DeLorean and Michael Jackson, the last of whom appears with his chiseled profile, like a wax figure, in Steve Werblun’s piece.

We see Heidi Fleiss shedding a tear as her verdict is read, as drawn with a crude intensity by Mary Chaney. Werblun’s image of Fleiss’ sister on the witness stand takes the form of four portraits, presented as a sequence of emotional stages, from composed to distraught and back.

There are dramatic scenes in the show that remind us of the less-than-frivolous nature of many high-profile trials. From the Simpson civil trial, Werblun depicts an attorney violently seizing a man’s throat, demonstrating to the jury the fatal attack on Ronald Goldman. Another work shows a witness in the Rodney King trial holding up a skull to illustrate the effects of blows on the victim.

Sometimes, the mere appearance of celebrities is revealing--even when the charges are less onerous than, say, O.J.’s.

Clint Eastwood, in his palimony trial, is drawn by Mona Edwards as a man whose face looks strained with anger, his mouth pulled into a scowl and eyebrows arched in such a way that you wouldn’t want to cross him in a dark alley.

David Rose’s work is more reportorial than the others’, in that he depicts socio-historical vignettes and has the luxury of time and reflection, as in a scene of German Jewish refugees being turned away at the Swiss border in 1938, and one from the 1996 trial of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassin.

But Rose’s own sharpened courtroom instincts are obvious. He knows how to frame a subject, as in his drawing of Klaus Barbie, seen in focus and with detail behind his glass enclosure in the courtroom. Barbie is clearly the centerpiece in a dizzy hum of activity, and the details get sketchier as they radiate away from the glum old man, perhaps wishing vainly he were somewhere else.

The rough, seemingly unfinished compositional strategy of Rose’s piece may have arisen out of necessity and the rush of a deadline. But the end result, now seen in the quiet, patient domain of an art gallery, is a work of art that manages to convey the grim emotionality of a scene. That’s an art, by whatever name.

BE THERE

“Artist Reporter,” through Feb. 28 at Lankershim Arts Center Gallery, 5108 Lankershim Blvd. in North Hollywood. Gallery hours: Thursday-Saturday, 3-6:30 p.m.; (818) 752-2682.