Adding a dash of lilac chalk to your cheekbone will make you seem ten times kinder. I generally prefer to use pencil to pastel for courtroom sketches but then there are levels of softness and swiftness to consider. I certainly tend to pick the softer grades of lead. My hands are always shiny with graphite by lunchtime and after a full day in court I am used to finding Batman masks of carbon absentmindedly rubbed across my eyes.
It is understood that there is enough carbon in the average human body to fill over 900 pencils. The draft form of John Steinbeck’s novel East of Eden is reported to have required 300 pencils to complete (according to biographies he favoured the Blackwing 602 brand: “Half the pressure, twice the speed”). These two facts always hit me in tandem when sketching my cast of lawyers, defendants, and judges: there is the equivalent of three heavy-handed, best-selling books in every average adult human.
I blow across my chalk pastel picture of you, accidentally har- rumphing purple powder over a nearby lawyer’s suit.
In your email, you described our first proper face-to-face meeting specifically as a blind date so of course within the hour my laptop had grown hot as I busied myself researching your details. Did you know that you share a name with a dentist in Wisconsin? A dentist with big red glasses and a big red dog. The dog is called Astor. According to Image Search, dog, glasses, and dentist pose regularly together in the dental practice’s car park. I checked some dictionaries to see whether “car park” was one word or two because, really, who can say, and then an unfortunate mistype and sheer curiosity led to me to check whether “carp arks” exist. It’s all too easy to follow up details in a persistently blinkered way like this when idly browsing; by two o’clock in the morning I had steeled myself to the task at hand, however, and tapped your name once more into the search field. You were the eighth result.
Some flattering crosshatching will make your hair seem so much thicker, so I really go to town on you.
“And what do you do?” is the way most people phrase the question. I always reply that I am a journalist and add “but really more of an artist at heart.” After delivering that line, people attempt to strike a balance between polite coos of interest and a you-pompous-tosser rolling of eyes, which generally indicates how the night will proceed. If I say directly that I’m a courtroom artist, inevitably the other person just wants to know about any famous cases I have observed and then either make puns about finishing quickly or ask for their portrait to be jotted on a napkin right there at the table. In reality I’m not quite an illustrator, not quite an eyewitness, and galleries have little time for my portfolio: to claim I’m a journalist with pretensions makes things a little easier for me and harder for others to track me down.
On the evening of our meeting I had run from the Old Bailey so that I would have a chance of getting to the pub before you arrived. Rushing like this, my day’s final sketch had been hasty, pretty sloppy: I admit I didn’t bother drawing the defendant’s unpleasant paisley tie or the judge’s earrings. Skipping those kinds of particulars always plays on my mind afterwards but at the time it had seemed more important for me to secure a table. I arrived about ten minutes early and chose a place by the bar. My choice was not a good one: not only was it right under an amplified speaker, one that made a point of reminding me in blaring tones as I sat down that EVERY NOW AND THEN I FALL APART, but the seats were surrounded by reflective surfaces. My pencil-daubed, pastel-thumbed face blinked back at me from the bend of other tables’ wineglasses, the polished copper tabletop, the fake horse brasses hanging over the fake fireplace. I couldn’t risk going to the bathroom and missing your coming through the door so I ground the heel of my hand across my nose and hoped for the best. I would have to meet you in Impressionist mode.
Later in the evening I remember that I watched you overdo the Tabasco in your tomato juice but did not at the time think it was my place to comment.
Just now on the road adjacent to court, a passing siren started up and caused all of us courtroom artists to jump about a foot in the air. I glanced at my neighbour’s current sketch: his drawing hand had jolted against the page and now the judge has an accidental bright yellow unicorn horn. Here’s something you might not know: in American courts, where I trained, sketchers can draw during the actual court proceedings, but here we have to memorise every aspect of the scene then scamper en masse once the session is adjourned to this mossy paved yard and set it all down. Memorising details and sketching beyond the courtroom walls offers the opportunity to exercise a certain amount of improvisation: for example, a good-looking defendant who winks at me on the way out will have the cut of her suit improved in my drawing, while a juror who elbows rudely past will appear on paper with an obvious stripe of ankle showing between his sock and trouser leg. Speed is of the essence in sketching so that our final works can be photographed and whisked off to the studio or print room as soon as possible. The nature of this job has prepared me to work well under pressure and to commit visual details to my short-term memory very quickly. It’s all about coming up with easily memorable corresponding imagery. We are all fascinating and ugly when assessed detail by detail.
This is how I memorised your parts that evening in the pub:
• Dimples – parenthetical
• Forehead – the villain’s bull terrier in Oliver!
• Freckles on your forearm – sleet rather than a blizzard
• Eyelashes – ski-jump
• Mouth – Holly Hunter; Justin Theroux; my mother would say it was cruel; ballot-box tick marks on ClipArt
• Angle of chin to neck – egrets; Modigliani
• Nose – crumplable; Harold Loeb
• Gestures used when describing the recent rain – Windows 98 manicule cursor; Verrocchio’s Christ and St. Thomas
Falling somewhere between compiling a blazon and consulting a Rolodex, this appraisal took less than a second. I used to have a friend who was interested in my way of disassembling people’s features in order to remember them; she asked me once to list her details according to this method and sat patiently through my rundown of her face and proportions only to complain at the end that I had made her sound like an exploded lost property department. She then used the word sparagmos while ruffling my hair. I have not had time to look up its meaning but I like the sound of it. We lost touch after I broke her arm that time by the river.
A correction to my previous statement: it takes three heavy-handed, best-selling novels to make an average adult human in draft form.
I really am very sorry about the way that I left you in the morning, stealing from your house first thing on a Tuesday without waking you. The train was full of people either on their way to an early shift or sheepishly adjusting their clothing and trying not to throw up. In Waterloo station there’s a large clock that I always walk directly under- neath and for some reason that day I imagined what would happen if it came loose of its fittings and fell on top of me. In a montage I must have seen in some childhood cartoon, as it would make contact with the station floor I knew that the chimes in the clock’s belly would sound “When Will You Pay Me?” from the “Oranges and Lemons” skipping song. Only my hands and feet would be visible under the upturned clock-face, sticking out at two o’clock, four o’clock, seven o’clock, and ten o’clock positions. I pulled at my collar.
When I implied I was a journalist that evening, you had said that you were a professional dog walker. Earlier that day I had watched you leaving your office on the Strand in a sharp suit with some clients buzzing around you like flies around meat, but at the time I made it clear from my body language that I had not picked up on your lie. I gave that impression, impily implied. You certainly hadn’t picked up on my lies and the evening progressed genially, easily. You added more Tabasco to your glass while I arranged my smile to its best effect and mentally amended your Angle of chin to neck to being “Modigliani, but better.”
I suspect the need for my job will disappear in a few years, given advances in CCTV and recording software. It’s mad in a way that we aren’t obsolete already: a dying breed, unnoticed crayon jockeys with our vaudeville Memory Man skills. In the small outside space by the court where the competing artists scribble away at our canvases in the moments, borrowing each other’s erasers and fixatives and mounting our easels for the photographers, the waiting journalists and camera- men treat me as if I was a quaint hangover from another century. They make sure when they shake my hand that my fingers are clean, not wanting pastel residue to clog their Dictaphones or occlude to their lapels. My profession means that one becomes acutely aware of the rhetoric of dress and posture. That’s how I knew from the offset that you were keen on me just from the frequency of hands-to-hair gestures you made in the first five minutes.
Through habit rather than inclination, memories always occur to me as tableaux and frame-by-frame moments rather than as fluid events. That evening in the pub, for example, the devil was in the details and the angel in the angles of your hand on the hot sauce and the botched chiaroscuro of my smudged face; later, a series of images where your mouth became larger and brighter as it drew closer to mine, then, later still, the morning after, the standout picture I take away is of me with my back bent, shutting your front door so slowly and trying not to make a sound. Just now in court I was transfixed by the way the light streamed through the window and became stunted against your cheek as you took the stand.
Of course, it wasn’t really you up there in the dock—just someone who looked very much like you. That hardly matters. It’s you I’m putting in the picture.
I don’t really listen to cases once they are in session because I’m too busy memorising the details of the environment. Sitting through as many hearings and arraignments as I do, one soon realises just how much people shake and the different ways that nervousness or fear betrays itself in a face. I admit that I prefer those scenes to the ones that end with everyone smiling and relaxing in relief or satisfaction: those hardly make for interesting drawings. Everyone always looks like they’ve slept badly. If I was entirely honest in my drawings, I would run out of blue pastels for the shadows beneath everybody’s eyes: I’d run out of blue for the eyelids first, then white for all the hands twisting themselves into blurred, worried polygons in pinstriped laps.
It’s not that you have been on my mind particularly, you understand. The person in the dock really just did look a hell of a lot like you.
There are as many fads, regional differences, coteries, and schools in the courtroom-sketching world as with any other. I read an article recently which claimed New York courts favour pastels while California prefers watercolours. I am jealous of American court- room artists because they get to use a lot more orange on account of the jumpsuits; my Faber-Castell Polychromos Tangerine 111 is the most underused pastel in the box. We are all familiar with the limited vocabulary employed by the media to report those people who stand accused in court: “smirked” is a popular verb, as are the phrases “hung their head” or “dropped their head into their hands,” both of which I always feel imply that the writer is trying to hint at a guilty verdict, at guillotines or gibbets. So too my pencil- and pastel-led fingers have grown used to describing faces with shortcuts, and every day it feels as if I’m reproducing the same upthrust chin, the same lowered brow. People can be such boringly predictable composites after a while.
I used to do caricatures for tourists in Leicester Square. It’s a powerful place to be, behind a notepad. The friend I mentioned before—the sparagmos friend—told me after too much wine that she thought drawing a cruel caricature was like writing a cruel love letter, where the simplest x-shaped abrasion of lead against paper could ruin a person’s confidence. I liked that. She said that for both art forms even the blankest looks are busy with ink and that the wrong line in the wrong place can change a person’s life. It is hard sometimes to not fall back into a caricaturist’s fun grotesques during my current day- to-day. When I got this courtroom gig, I began collecting an album of serial killers’ portraits, I suppose in order to try and see whether I could detect any correlation or make an amateur phrenology of mug shots and find a cheat code for sketching criminals. The exercise was pointless, of course, and I now use that album to prop up my wobbly desk.
A few years ago a barrister’s wife bought one of my drawings as an anniversary gift. In the picture the barrister was standing, finger raised, during a murder case. Whenever I meet him in a corridor he tells me that the drawing has been framed and hangs above their refrigerator.
Sometimes I visit museums and sketch the people there, those engrossed in the exhibits as well as the bored: there is a whole canon of beauty and guilt before you hit the gift shop. I practice on the Underground too, where, just as in court, nobody meets anyone else’s eyes unless seeking to prove a point. If you spooled a line of wool along each commuter’s line of sight, plenty of threads would meet but few of them would tangle. I stare at my carriage mates for a whole revolution of the Circle line then spend the next three stops trying to get as many faces as I can down onto paper as accurately as possible. It’s good training. Sometimes I guess my subject’s occupations from their dress along with what kind of house they might live in or whether they are married. Little things. Occasionally I follow a few home to see whether I was right, and for the most part I am. You, in fact, were the first person to notice that I was tailing you from the tube stop. I was prepared and so when you turned around I had my story and props ready. I held up my wallet:
I thought I had seen it fall out of your bag at the corner there, No?, How embarrassing, I’d better hand it in, Do you know where the nearest—, So you live around here?, A lovely area, No, a bit further west, Know any good places to catch a drink sometime? Here’s my email and so on and so forth.
It’s crucial that nobody ever spots you, lest they start acting up. Keep your head down but take it all in: good advice for life and courtroom artists the world over.
One of the private kicks I get from my job is making embellishments. Look: I’m adding the little badge you wore in the pub to this picture. It’s usually cases that have the least media interest that afford the time to indulge myself, to include things like a doodled spider under a table or the crest on a water bottle label. A recent tough assignment involved a man who was accused of human trafficking: he had tattoos all over his face, throat, and hands. The temptation to just jot down an approximation of a chintzy Willow pattern was overwhelming. I hated and loved him for the complexity of it.
The shadows that fell under the microphones looked like stretched speech-marks as the almost-you answered the prosecutor’s questions. The curlicues and flicks of the judge’s wig became engrossing landscapes. You can always count on me to catch the details of a courtroom’s stained glass windows, or of an evening, a morning, of pub carpets with their complexities and tessellations. Earlier today, you—the person that looks so much like you—wore red in court. A good move. Red comes across as competitive, puts people in mind of Manchester United, British Lions, Ferrari.
You look best in profile and so that is how I’ll draw you up today.
I remember that you had doubled-up with laughter at my bad jokes like origami was going out of fashion. By the first drink I knew this would be easy; by the third round I thought it was time to ask you because your hand was near your ear and I knew you would agree; by the twelfth unnecessary vowel of the query, I realised that I needed you to say yes. The adverts on the tube as we made our way back to yours all seemed to be requesting small acts of kindness to be paid to save the bee population, or donkeys, or small Syrian children because it’s only three pounds and you’re texting anyway.
I checked my inbox a little tentatively a couple of days after our meeting but there had been only one new message. It was not from you. I had bought a pair of sunglasses and the company signed their emailed receipt with “Lots of love.”
I’m including your portrait in this courtroom scene and, honestly, for a fifteen-minute job it’s one of my very best. You’d love it if you ever saw it: you look just great, really confident: the line of your shoulders and your jawline convey that you’re assured, no flies on me. I’ve drawn you sitting slightly taller in your chair than is strictly accurate too, but who will pick up on that? In the same way a newspaper editor will not question whether their crossword compiler is making up answers to the clues that have been set, who at the time will nitpick my pen strokes? It seemed like a fairly big case, so I imagine your head and shoulders will pop up beneath headlines that are meant for somebody else on a breakfast table near you quite soon, or be handed to you in the free newspapers on your way to work. Thank you for all the details: your hand on the glass, your name, your apartment number, the catalogue of errors in the angles as we sat across from one another amongst all those reflective surfaces. It is quite flattering, and unmistakeably you. Something not to frame, but something to show that you were seen.