(CN) — When a county clerk faced a judge in 2015 for failing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, courtroom sketch artist Art Lien traveled from his home in Maryland to Ashland, Kentucky, so he could document the case.
Arriving early for Kim Davis’s contempt hearing, Lien sketched scenes both inside and outside of the courthouse.
“People were praying on the steps outside. I sketched that,” Lien recalled. “She got on the stand, and she testified. They led her out of the courtroom in handcuffs. I got that.”
Lien turned in several detailed sketches from the event. But when the hearing aired as the lead story on NBC Nightly News, not a single Lien sketch appeared.
“That helped move me toward retirement, for sure,” he said, half jokingly.
Lien was one of a handful of artists who made a living sketching court dramas. While Lien’s long career would face increasing competition from still photos and video, when he retired in 2022, the craft was on the cusp of a major comeback with the Donald Trump court hearings.
The former president has been the subject of numerous court filings, both civil and criminal, since leaving office. And since cameras have been largely limited or outright prohibited in those high-profile cases, even longtime courtroom sketch artists have experienced newfound exposure for their work.
“I’ve gotten more comments, both negative and positive, about my pictures than I’ve ever had before,” said Elizabeth Williams, a courtroom artist whose work on the Trump cases came decades after she chronicled the Hillside Stranglers court proceedings in 1980.
While Lien doesn’t regret missing out on the Trump cases, he does admit to having trouble adjusting to retirement after a 45-year career.
“I’m a little lost,” he said. “When I first retired, I didn’t want to do anything.”
After graduating from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1976, Lien worked several manual labor jobs to make money.
“After I graduated, I was worried,” he said. “I was getting crappy jobs: house painting, tarring roofs and lying sod — stuff like that.”
So when a local TV station offered him an opportunity to sketch a racketeering trial of former Maryland Governor Marvin Mandel, Lien seized the opportunity to put his artistic training to work — albeit in an unfamiliar setting.
“The courtroom was a completely new thing to me,” he said. “The first time I went into the courtroom, everything was so far away.”
While that first job didn’t work out — “I got fired the first day” — he eventually was hired by numerous news outlets, including CBS, NBC and SCOTUSblog. Many of the cases he sketched included highly publicized ones, including the trials of Oklahoma City bomber Tim McVeigh, the D.C. sniper killers, and the Boston Marathon bomber. Lien also chronicled the U.S. Supreme Court and the Trump Senate impeachment hearings.
While his medium changed over the years, one thing was constant: His output.
“He draws incredibly fast,” said Williams, co-author of the book “The Illustrated Courtroom: 50 Years of Court Art,” which both explains the craft and offers a look at some of the nation’s most famous court cases. “He’s like lightning on paper.”
That speed allowed him to tell a story with several drawings from a long day of court testimony or to quickly capture the scene of a very brief hearing.
“Sometimes an arraignment might take five minutes,” he said.
Throughout his career, Lien has used pastels and markers, colored pencils and, more recently, graphite pencils with watercolors. His courtroom sketches were always a blend of art and journalism.
Many more contemporary courtroom artists, particularly on the East Coast, Williams said, create interpretations of scenes, whereas she favors the journalistic approach of drawing the action as it appeared.
