The Courtroom Sketch Wiz Turning Trump’s Trial Into High Art
Donald Trump’s ongoing hush money trial is the pinnacle of American spectacle, a lurid phantasmagoria of shifty lawyers and adult failsons (Hi, Eric!) tweeting their way through the embarrassment of public scrutiny.
Any hard-nosed political reporter would kill for a regular spot in the courtroom, and visual artist Isabelle Brourman is one of the lucky few. The New York native works in several mediums, but her current focus is courtroom sketches, which she’s producing at a breakneck clip for New York magazine while covering the trial.
Courtroom sketching is a centuries-old art, and its practitioners in the New York City media scene are mostly old-guard traditionalists. At 30, Brourman’s age sets her apart from her peers, but it’s her sketches that are the truly extraordinary draw. Rather than capturing one person at a time, Brourman’s watercolor and colored-pencil figures overlap and bleed into one another like atoms clustered within the same organism. There’s abstraction at play here, but journalistic diarism too.