Library may get famous court sketches

October 14, 2010|Associated Press

NEW YORK — Marilyn Church didn’t even have to ask Bernard Madoff, Martha Stewart, Woody Allen, and John Gotti to sit for their portraits. She simply found a good seat in court and pulled out her pad.

Soon, the New York courtroom artist’s 3,500 sketches could be heading to the Library of Congress, which said yesterday it wants to acquire them and is finalizing a deal with Church.

“It’s a great spectrum of all the things that were going on in our culture and having a front row seat on that,’’ Church, in her 60s, said in a telephone interview yesterday.

Church has done sketches for various news organizations over the years, beginning as a freelancer for WABC-TV in 1973 and later for the Associated Press and The New York Times.

The list of the infamous in her repertoire is long, including David Berkowitz, the “Son of Sam’’ killer who terrorized New York in the 1970s; Amy Fisher, known as the “Long Island Lolita’’; and the Islamic militant leader Omar Abdel Rahman.

Celebrities are hard to sketch, Church said. “You have to draw with a dead-on likeness. If you miss, it’s pretty bad.’’