My favorite image to capture is the neck of a defiant woman as she stares down a man who thinks he can destroy her. I have seen that strong neck hold up the chin of Amber Heard and the Jane Does of Danny Masterson. I drew the uncompromising neck of E. Jean Carroll and, most recently, the neck of the unapologetic Stormy Daniels. I operate from my own personal trauma, which overtook my system ten years ago and now remains as a private art studio. Only a few close to me have seen the other side of the smile I wear genuinely to court each day. It’s as close as I can get to my childhood smile.
Each day, I dressed for court based on a theme. To pair with David Pecker’s catch-and-kill testimony, I put on vintage D&G tabloid pants I had been loaned from Desert Stars Vintage. For Michael Cohen’s testimony, I wore the exact same dress Ivanka Trump did for her first ride on Air Force One, requesting the piece from the designer’s archive. (At the time, Ivanka credited the garment to her own brand, though that is not the case.) The Wolford tattoo tights underneath got holes from my clawing them past my ass in the toilet stall to rush back to the courtroom. I got black ink all over my friend Patricia’s vintage silk Christian Lacroix set, which I wore to Trump Tower after court, perfectly matching its luxurious dusty-pink public bathroom. On the day of the verdict, I wore black Givenchy leather boots with two halves of a lock dangling from their sides, setting off the metal detectors each time I passed through. Nothing was practical. The point was to compromise as little as possible, to stay on edge, to gather as much as I could, and to try my best to ensure that my shirt was not tucked into my thong as I rushed from the bathroom to my seat. Thankfully, that happened only three times.
I have been challenged regularly about my intentions with the work — sometimes accused of villainizing Donald Trump, other times perceived as glamorizing him, but the truth is that I did everything in my own style, which I would summarize as “Tasmanian-devil glamour.” There is the 200-year-old tradition of the court sketch, art for absent eyes, and my own work, which is art for art’s sake. That is the seat I created for myself in the court system, and I owe it to the courtroom artists who labored away before I showed up, much to their surprise (they hadn’t seen a new face in decades) and sometimes their hostility. I sneaked in on their coattails, modeling myself as one of them and then breaking code by exercising (not without paranoia) my freedom to interpret as I saw fit.
Max Azzarello set himself on fire that Friday before opening statements in the park outside the courthouse. When I arrived, all that was left of him was a slow-rolling yellowish-brown smoke, which smelled plastic and gamy. I swallowed bits of him while I attempted to eat a cheesesteak offered to me by a cameraman in the press pool. Every so often, we would have to stop eating because the wind blew his ashes directly into us. Eventually, I stuffed the cheesesteak in my jacket pocket and found it later, to my surprise, while reaching for my Juul.
During the verdict, I looked like a drummer or a furious musical conductor in climax. Guilty, Guilty, Guilty. I grab pens, I stain my shirt. Guilty. Dip the brush in water — Guilty — and then into my watercolors. Guilty. No time, no time! I change paper — Guilty — and bang down graphite. I look at Trump, I look at the jurors, and I swallow it all into my trauma library as I mark them. Guilty. The judge. Guilty, Guilty. Eric Trump’s eyes, Alina Habba’s twisting lips. Guilty. I get what I can as the whole trial begins to pack itself up and go away as abruptly and dramatically as it began.
Related
- Why Michael Cohen Still Misses Donald Trump
- What the Polls Are Saying After Trump’s Conviction
- The Courage of Alvin Bragg’s Conviction
