Newspaper Article
COURTROOM ARTIST'S Susan Schary is familiar, very familiar, with the faces of crime. She draws them. In quick but fully fleshed pastel portraits, she captures the expressions of those accused of some of this area's worst crimes. She has drawn John DiGreggorio, a Bucks County man who bludgeoned his daughter and dismembered her. For weeks, she sat in City Hall and sketched Myla Friedman, the part-time model and law student who killed an unfaithful lover in bed. She has squeezed the faces of as many as 15 defendants and their attorneys into a small portrait that seems to stretch forever when the television camera pans across it. Schary also renders the anguish of families and friends, those of the defendants as well as the victims. And once, when particularly touched by a mother whose young son had been brutally killed, she painted a portrait to substitute for the high school graduation picture that would never be taken. She finds humor, as well as pathos, in court. Faced with drawing a corpulent government witness in one federal racketeering trial, Schary rendered him with a tail and labeled the picture "A real-life Jaba the Hut." That picture and others, along with several large oil paintings, are on display through June 25 at Temple University, at the Diamond Club in Mitten Hall. The one-woman show is sponsored by the alumni association of the Tyler School of Art, where Schary earned a degree about 20 years ago. Schary herself is a vivid picture, alive with color. Her strawberry blond hair falls in soft curls around her shoulders. Her wide smile is always perfectly framed by coral lipstick, and big green eyes look out from behind lightly tinted glasses. She is such a fixture in Philadelphia-area courts that Schary played herself in a movie that was recently filmed in City Hall, passing the days sketching the events of the film trial as though it were real. And her work hangs in dozens of legal offices and homes. Winning attorneys frequently buy a drawing as a memento of a successful trial. Judges, witnesses and families of victims have bought drawings; some who haven't been drawn as part of the trial commission a picture for themselves. Schary, 56, was born in Chestnut Hill and grew up in Mount Airy, the daughter of a homemaker and a nationally known traveling salesman. Her father, Sam Schary, launched the first ballpoint pen - it wrote under water - invented by Milton Reynolds. She began drawing around the age of 3. Five years later, she considered herself a serious artist and was taking Saturday morning art classes at the Philadelphia Museum of Commercial Art. From then on, she says, "I drew every day of my life." After a year of studying acting in New York and "two years alone in my studio painting," she settled on art as the focus of her life. "There were other things I wanted to do," she said. "But there is only so much you can do in life. What I really love to do is paint." Schary returned to Philadelphia and earned a degree at the Tyler School of Art. She combined teaching with painting, as life evolved into a gypsy-like journey in and out of marriage, to Italy, California, Saudi Arabia and back to the West Coast. Along the way she bore two daughters. All along, she painted to support herself. Sometimes the work was glamorous- painting near-life-size oil portraits of Saudi sheiks and royal princesses. At other times, it was mundane, churning out several versions of the same painting for commercial art ventures. By 1985, Schary was living again in California and "craving" Philadelphia. But a psychic advised her to "start new" and avoid returning to her roots. Simultaneously, she spotted a flier advertising an "artist's house" for rent in New Hampshire. She and her daughters spent two years there, drinking in the scenery and the friendly atmosphere. "But it was a very bad place to make a living as an artist," Schary said. She followed her instincts and returned to Philadelphia three years ago, to a tiny house in Mount Airy whose walls are a tapestry of paintings. Every corner is stuffed with memorabilia and icons. Cats snooze in soft drifts on the windowsills and in chairs, and Fantasia, a colorful parrot, squawks possessively. Schary again found herself in the position of "having to think up ways to make a living." Watching the television news one night, she found an answer in a report about a murder trial, illustrated with sketches by a courtroom artist. "I looked at it and said, 'God, I could do better than that,' " she recalled. After a station manager saw Schary's samples, the free-lance job was hers. Now, she is frequently called upon by Channels 6 and 29 to illustrate high-profile trials. Schary sits in one of the front rows of the courtroom or, in the case of non-jury trials, in the first chair of the jury box, her sketch board propped on the railing in front of her and trays of stubby pastels balanced precariously on the seats around her. She works constantly, stopping only occasionally to take a completed drawing to camera crews waiting in the hallway outside the courtroom to film the artwork for the noon or 6 o'clock news. During breaks in a trial, Schary is inevitably surrounded by curious onlookers - some of them the subjects of her art. They smile at their own likeness, or complain if they look too old or too fat. Schary spends from 20 minutes to two hours on each drawing. She starts with a quick sketch in charcoal pencil, then fleshes them out with pastels. Detectives, police officers and minor witnesses usually merit a head-and-shoulders portrait, often with particular attention paid to their hands - Schary says that body language tells her a lot about a subject. But Schary specializes in full courtroom scenes that encompass lawyers on both sides, the judge, courtroom officers and, often even onlookers. These are the drawings she works on for an hour or more, sometimes putting them aside temporarily to capture a new witness on paper. "I'm fast with my paintings. I've always been fast," Schary says, explaining that speed, as well as artistic ability, is key. Another prerequisite is the ability to capture a fleeting scene or expression in memory, to be drawn after the subjects have changed position. One of the most difficult scenes during the Friedman murder trial was the re-enactment of the killing from Friedman's statement to police. Two detectives, depicting Friedman and her lover, Bryan Edwards, arrayed themselves on the floor of the courtroom while a medical examiner, the attorneys and dozens of spectators looked on. Schary captured the scene, and the drawing is exhibited in the Temple show. "I got the important thing - the position of the two people on the floor," she said. "I kept moving one position to another in the courtroom to catch everyone else." Also included in the show are three drawings of accused sex offender Edward Savitz, who died of AIDS in March. The drawings, made during three hearings held months apart, depict Savitz dwindling away from disease. Schary says she sometimes winces at the grisly descriptions and graphic evidence she hears in court. She couldn't sit through some of the trials if she weren't drawing, she says. The art lets her escape. "I'm concentrating on my drawing…and I'm enjoying that," she says. "I'm hearing that stuff, and some of it makes me cringe. But it also fascinates me."
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