Conversation With Court Sketch Artist Janet Hamlin

Conversation With Court Sketch Artist Janet Hamlin
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I met Janet Hamlin while freelancing on a TV show earlier this year. We both work as scenic artists and when I learned she is also a court sketch artist that has sketched the Guantanamo Military Tribunals, I wanted to find out more and share it with you. This is an excerpt for Huffington Post from an ongoing interview which I will publish in it's entirety in my book of interviews in the near future. Enjoy.

2015-09-30-1443576112-4589722-janethand.jpg Image: Janet Hamlin

MLN: What was your first court sketch job?

JH: The Martha Moxley murder in Norwalk, Connecticut in 2002. And it was a month long thing with a Kennedy cousin, Michael Skakel. Great, excellent, riveting kind of case to cut my teeth on, so to speak.

MLN: Do you have a "greatest hits" of cases that you've sketched?

JH: Oh, well yeah. I've had some kind of interesting situations, starting out with Michael Skakel. So, there were some pretty high-profile, interesting people that came in to observe, including Dominick Dunne, who is, as you know, a Vanity Fair crime writer and justice.

Martha Stewart, drawing her was fascinating. A huge switch from drawing bearded terrorists.

And then there was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, you know, the 9/11.

2015-09-30-1443577081-6029788-5512AttashKSM660x495.jpg
9/11 DEFENDANTS WALID bin Attash, left, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, appear at their Guantanamo Bay arraignment, May 5, 2012.
Image: Janet Hamlin

MLN: I remember that. That was a big one.

JH: Yeah, there was an interesting case in Philadelphia, Jihad Jane. She was a blonde hair, blue-eyed woman who was planning to set up a jihad and it alarmed everybody because you're not going to expect that, right?

MLN: That's cool. Do you find that the crime influences drawings on any level?

JH: Yeah, the mood of the court definitely has an influence. As much as you try to stay neutral, it has an influence. If somebody is going to be angry and have an outburst, then you've got to show that in your drawing with the blind quality, colors, boldness of movement.

MLN: Those are the vibrations that you have to listen to, to draw.

JH: Well, when you can, as I mentioned earlier, the 9/11 trial, they actually had this portable courthouse with the viewing separated by sound delays and glass. And so, you don't have the luxury of just listening and reacting because what you've heard happened way before. We hear "all rise" and everybody's already sat down. So, in that case, I have to watch body language and movements to try to determine what's going on.

MLN: Is this something you stumbled into by accident or is this something that always interested you?

JH: Well, it always interested me and I always wondered how people got into it, but it came to me in the form of a client who was the art director at Associated Press. And he was the one that said "I think you'd be a great court artist and I'm going to send you to the Martha Moxley murder, see how you do." And that's how it took off and they started sending me to different things.

So, I'd gone back to sketch the youngest detainee being held was Omar Khadr (who was 19), who was found almost dead and then they realized the value of him - his al Qaeda background, or his father, as far as I know. I think it's al Qaeda, but anyway, terrorism. So, Canada was very interested in this kid as well as pretty much the fact that he was a child soldier being held as an adult.

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Omar Khadr, in white, watches his pretrial hearing at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Apr. 29, 2010. Image: Janet Hamlin

I think he was found at the age of 15, he was young. He didn't even have facial hair. But, still a teenager and being held and they wanted to pin the fact that a grenade had been thrown and a medic had been killed. He died 5 days later and they wanted to pin it on Omar. So, I followed that probably the most comprehensively and was sent often to sketch Omar in the court.

MLN: Do you feel like you became drawn personally to this story? Is that why you felt, like, I'm going to follow this story out, because you felt something for it? Or is that just the job?

JH: No, I mean you definitely feel something. You get a connection. I'm always like, "why is this person on trial? What did they do? What's it about?" But then, you know, I become more or less like a journalist. You get the facts, but I don't want to necessarily inject my opinions either way. I just want to try to be this visual conduit and just pick up, like, think when you hear those seismographs and you see them picking up everything that's happening sound-wise? I feel like that as an artist. I'm trying to use my pencil in the same way where I'm picking up body language or the emotion or the expression. Where is the action happening? And trying to capture that, but edit out those frivolous details because you just don't have time.

MLN: Right. Yeah, commonly how long do you have?

JH: It varies. I mean, something can happen in two minutes that's so important. And you know, I just take these visual Polaroids in my mind. Literally, if I'm drawing something, I'll throw it down to the ground and start this, jot this thing down, you know, brown line it in, fill it in, and then go back to the other sketches. So I can have up to four things going on at once.

MLN: Okay, so commonly, you would start one and then you can go back to it later.

JH: Yes, because you just never know. You've got to be prepared at any minute to sketch and things change a lot. When I first went down there, we were in a courtroom where I was actually in the courtroom with no separation. It was a small room in an old building, court 1. So it was very intimate. And then, three years later or so, two or three years later, they built a portable courthouse in Camp Justice on this runway and that's when they separated us out. That was from the 911. So when I was drawing Omar, I was always in a pretty intimate environment. There was no piping of the sound, forty second delays and all that. So I was hearing him live, seeing it live in the space, so I feel like my drawings are richer and better for that. And in fact, Canada sent me often so I was definitely tied into this. Every time he was in court, almost, I was there drawing him. Drawing every pre-trial hearing, every witness recounting, and then finally to trial and drawing all of that. So, it's the most comprehensive visual story that I captured there.

MLN: Let's take it back a little bit. So, before Guantanamo Bay, what kind of court sketching were you doing? How did you get into this line of work?

JH: I was working with the Associated Press and I was an artist for the military and the art director there saw that I liked to work diversely. Like, in charcoal and always capturing face and emotion so he would have me do obituary drawings. [laughs]

MLN: Cool.

JH: Famous people passing away. [laughs] So morose. And I was doing, you know, sports things, various things and then I get a phone call. And I had just finished - I love murder mysteries - and I had just finished the Moxley Murder trial book called Murder in Greenwich, written by Mark Fuhrman, of all people, who was the O.J. Simpson police officer.

MLN: That's who wrote a book on JonBennet Ramsey, right?

JH: Maybe so, but this was like a total celebrity case and they sent me to Norwalk, Connecticut for a month to draw this thing from beginning to end and I was hooked. I had never court sketched. I happened to be fortunate enough to sit next to a very confident, competent, court artist who shared her tricks and what she did and the materials she used and from there, it was a kick start.

In 2006 they sent me to Guantanamo. And they sent me for three trips and then after that, I started going for all the media, various media, because the hearings kept happening, the court appearances, and I think by then I had an "inroad" with the media. I was a known entity because there's a big changing of the guard every 6 months, it changes staff in Guantanamo.

MLN: Why is that?

JH: It's a rotating assignment and people are rotating in for 6 to 9, to 12 months. And they rotate out and you have a whole new crew. And for media, anything that's fluid and fluent and a known thing, you're going to go with it. And I think that's one of the reasons I kept going back.

MLN: Right, because you're dependable. They know you, you've been there before, and they know that "she knows what she's doing; we don't have to hold her hand."

JH: Yeah, and I grew up on military bases. This is home. I understand this environment, because bases are like targets. They're like, "Do you know how to navigate through the base?" and they do that on purpose. Because when someone's deployed somewhere, they feel familiar. Wherever they are, a base is a familiar environment.

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On the fourth day of pretrial hearings in 2008's 9/11 war crimes prosecution, Alexandra Scott, left, who lost her father Randy Scott, 48, sits beside Martin and Dorine Toyen, right, who lost their daughter Amy, 24.
Image: Janet Hamlin

MLN: That's very interesting. I never thought about that. So there's a sociological structure that you had stepped into that you were already familiar with because you grew up around it.

JH: Right, and I was familiar with the military thinking and mindset, but I also had a civilian mindset because I'd lived through 9/11. I had papers drop on me and smoke, you know, I lived through that. I lived on a street where people were staggering back after that whole thing. So, I had feet on both sides of the river.

MLN: This morning, we were talking about the living conditions in Guantanamo. Can you describe to me what that was like?

JH: When I first started going back, we were living in the bachelor quarters on the other side of the lagoon. And it meant taking a ferry ride back and forth. A few years in, to cut that out, plus as they were going forward with the trials, they built Camp Justice on the runway there. And Camp Justice is just made up of a bunch of quonset hut tents that have generators in them, so we have electricity. Air conditioning that's like meat locker cold, but it keeps out the vermin - the iguanas, the banana rats, the crabs, and the poisonous snakes. Six beds to a tent. I try to room with people that I know. The tents have a fridge, a microwave. It's basically a Motel 6, only you're camping out on the runway.

MLN: So, it's just like regular life, but in an army base, right?

JH: Yeah, it's actually, I think it's a Marine base. They call it a Joint Task Force. The bases are now comprised of different military outfits, so it's Marines, Navy. A lot of factions come through. But, yes it's a base and it's always been a base for a long time. It's just that notoriety and everything happened with the Guantanamo that we know. The prison is on the other side of the hill. And you know, people can actually live there for years and never visit the prisons. There are families there. There are high school kids that I see eating in the galley with us. But we have to wear badges whenever we go out and about that tell people who we are. That we're media, so I think that separates us from conversations that we shouldn't be having possibly or just, I don't know. It's an identifier.

MLN: I wanted to take it back to magazine work. So, I know the magazine work led to the court work, the sketch work. How did you get into magazine illustration?

JH: When I went to school at Arts Center, I specifically wanted to be an illustrator freelance and editorial illustration is what magazine and newspaper is. It's basically, you're illustrating for editorial purposes. So, I went for that kind of client, so I worked with Simon and Schuster, Harper Collins, Washington Post, New York Times. Newsday, I had a regular column with them and then I did medical stuff too and fantasy stuff. It was all over the place, which I loved. I loved solving visual problems in a variety of ways and not always in the same style. So, that's what I went to New York for and moved from the West coast for that reason.

MLN: You've seen the business shift to digital, too and be photography-based. Did that hurt the business at all?

JH: Oh yeah. It's really changed. I mean, when I first started, it was on the cusp of - believe it or not - fax machines and scanners, so I thought I was all that because I had a fax machine that was a scanner. That was my biggest investment coming out of school was to buy one of those and then I moved to the East with that big machine. You depended on FedEx to get your illustrations to people. They had to peel them and drum scan them. It was a lot more time and money and expense, but it was localized. People in Europe, you weren't competing with a global illustration world so much. And, as digital media got more and more sophisticated and there were programs that you could run filters through, magazines - their budgets were getting lowered as more online presence was happening. Craigslist made a lot of papers fold because they lost all that ad revenue. And a lot of the trade magazines and newspapers, their budgets shrank, and they needed less editorial illustrators. So the market has dwindled down and art directors stopped meeting up with you in person. It was all, "let me see your site."

MLN: That's funny. And then like court sketching came at the right time. Like, right before the crash and at the height of NSA paranoia.

JH: Yeah, it was just one of those things where I just had a series of fortunate occurrences. AP was a client. I was doing all kinds of the obituary drawings, the Olympics, the major sports and the major events, and then he thought of me to do court sketching and that's how that happened. And it became what I'm doing even today when there's a need for it.

Janet's book Sketching Guantanamo: Court Sketches of the Military Tribunals, 2006-2013 is distributed through Fantagraphics and is available here.

Transcribed with love by Courtney Eddington

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