The artists bringing color to the courtroom in Trumps criminal trial

Nearly five decades into her career, courtroom artist Christine Cornell has become well acquainted with the darker aspects of humanity — she’s drawn murderers and mobsters, financiers turned swindlers and celebrities cleared of copyright-infringement charges. Still, when Cornell — who is currently drawing Donald Trump’s historic criminal trial — comes to the courtroom, it is not with cynicism but “with the full intention of kind of loving everybody,” she said.

Cornell, who was “born with a pad in my lap” and whose art is defined by vivid hues and electric energy, says her work requires binoculars, pastels and heart. “I try to make a person living and breathing on my page,” the 69-year-old said. “I want you to feel them as well as see them.”

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The artists documenting the former president’s trial, who also include courtroom veterans Jane Rosenberg and Elizabeth Williams, are united by an abiding fascination with people and a sharp sense for the court’s many moods and shades. In an environment where complex legal questions are boiled down into black and white, innocent or guilty, they are there to see in color.

Laws banning cameras from the courtroom date back to the 1930s, sparked by intrusive flashbulbs at the trial of Bruno Hauptmann for the murder of aviator Charles Lindbergh’s baby. Today, New York is one of the few U.S. states that prohibit camera usage during most court proceedings, according to a 2022 report from the Fund for Modern Courts. As a result, it points out, they “have operated without the transparency and oversight that audiovisual coverage brings.”

Such courtrooms are one of the few places where artists are solely responsible for keeping a visual record — and some are concerned about how this could play out in the Trump trial. Critics argue that the lack of cameras could give Trump an advantage, while others accuse sketch artists of editorializing.

“There has always been disagreement about how people are rendered, but [courtroom artists] are not there to caricature,” said Sara Duke, a Library of Congress curator who organized a 2017 exhibition about courtroom art. She emphasizes that such artists are journalists who work for media outlets and are “there to capture a moment in time, the nuances of the way somebody positions their body, the way they gesture.”

Duke says a strong courtroom sketch “is something that distills the essence of the trial in one drawing” — pointing, as an example, to Rosenberg’s drawing of a scene from the Boston marathon bomber’s trial, in which an FBI agent holds up the tattered backpack that contained an explosive.

Those moments can be hard to come by. Courtroom sketching is often described as a kind of artistic sprint that involves racing to capture fleeting moments and toiling under unforgiving deadlines. It requires “being in good form, like an athletic thing,” said Cornell, who draws Trump three to four times a day and describes filing her sketches via photos taken in the bathroom.

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Cornell, whose work appears primarily on CNN, aspires to make pictures “that I want to look at for a long time,” she said. “Drawing is a time lapse … you’re picking the characteristics that you think are most germane to telling the story.”

That curation is not without its challenges. Cornell, for instance, deliberated whether to draw Trump when she said she saw him doze off during pretrial proceedings, before deciding against it. “It was brief and we were all up at some ungodly hour and wouldn’t have minded taking a nap,” she said.

During Trump’s Miami arraignment, Williams, who started as a fashion illustrator and is on contract with the Associated Press, faced a similar dilemma. “I remember drawing his face and saying to myself, ‘My God, that’s not a 77-year-old’s face,’” she said, noting what she described as a curious lack of wrinkles. “I can’t add lines where there aren’t lines.”

The drawings brought the expected criticism: Trump looked too young. This time around, he’s become “easier to draw,” she said, noting the stress has started to show.

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Williams would know — these artists could probably say as much about the way a defendant’s face moves as the lawyers could about their client’s case.

“I’m not interested in flowers and landscape or any of that. I think humans are really interesting,” she said, adding that drawing them is “challenging almost all of the time.”

Rosenberg, who works with Reuters and other clients, said abstract art was the dominant form when she was in college and representational work was dismissed as passé, but she was a “closet portrait artist” who drew herself in her kitchen mirror. Courtroom art gave her an outlet.

That acuity was on display this week when Rosenberg captured a teary Hope Hicks testifying. In Rosenberg’s depiction, the former Trump aide’s cheeks have a soft, rosy flush; her hair is disheveled, with streaks of emotive blue; and her eyes are a tangle of frenetic lines that appear unsure where to settle.

“Expressions come in the eyebrows, the mouth muscles, the angle of the head,” Rosenberg said. “There are so many things to look for in a face. I love that.”

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While some might find it monotonous to repeatedly draw courtrooms, Cornell sees a space alive with exciting visuals. She recalls a theatrical attorney with a Salvador Dali mustache, and notes a woman on the prosecutor’s team at the Trump trial who has “a complexion like a Victorian doll” and is especially fun to draw.

Lately, Cornell has been taken with the purple glow of electronic screens in the courtroom, illuminating faces from below. “Everything gets a lot more dramatic when you have a bunch of purple,” she said.

And that’s not the only way technology is making its way into the art form. Williams says she has changed her drawing tools to increase the contrast between light and dark colors in her work, aware of the way it flashes briefly across television screens and social media. Rosenberg, meanwhile, attributes her increasingly loose drawing style in part to tighter deadlines, the product of an internet-driven, 24-hour news cycle.

Even as they adapt to it, the work of these sketch artists is a counterpoint to the immediacy we have come to expect in an online world, where images are captured and spread near instantaneously. Rosenberg said that while there is art in photography, “anything touched by human hands is just more interesting to look at.”

“It’s not a quick snapshot,” she said. “There are more layers to it.”

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