Before Andy Austin became a top courtroom sketch artist in Chicago, she had to overcome an artistic crisis.
She’d grown weary of fruit. Apples and oranges, to be exact.
Ms. Austin was a stay-at-home mom who’d studied art before moving from Boston to Chicago for her husband’s job, and she was looking for more exciting subjects to sketch than the produce that sat on her dining-room table.
Her kids weren’t so little anymore. So she started roaming Chicago in search of subjects to draw. She found them everywhere: people riding a bus, someone drunk laying on a park bench, kids playing on the beach, men hunched over the chess tables at North Avenue Beach.
This was the late 1960s, so she also had antiwar and civil rights protests to sketch, taking part in a few herself.
Longing for subjects that would remain more or less in one place, she ventured into a courtroom. But that first effort left her nothing but frustrated. The deputies at the Dirksen Federal Courthouse stopped her, confiscating her pens and sketchpad because she wasn’t a member of the news media.
So, the next day, she brought a smaller pad. On it, she’d jotted down what looked like a shopping list: Paper towels. Eggs. Flowers. Wine. Bread.
The ruse worked, and she found herself in court for the chaotic and much-observed trial of a group of activists against the Vietnam war known as the Chicago Eight, who became the Chicago Seven after the case against Bobby Seale was declared a mistrial.
The 1969 trial’s defendants — among them Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Tom Hayden — faced charges that included, for some, crossing state lines with the intention of inciting a riot in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
Days into the trial, during a break, WLS-Channel 7 reporter Hugh Hill was berating a sketch artist who was leaving him in the lurch to head to the East Coast for another trial. Ms. Austin went over to Hill and proclaimed: “I can draw. Hire me.”
That was the beginning of a career that would span more than four decades in which she covered many of Chicago’s biggest trials, her sketches showing the world what went on inside those courtrooms.
Ms. Austin died April 20 from natural causes. She was 89.
In the early days, she had to work hard to prove herself. And the stress sometimes showed. She’d grasp a red bandana to absorb her nervous sweat.
During that first trial, she sketched Seale, who’d been ordered by Judge Julius Hoffman to be bound and gagged because of what the judge said were his disruptions.
At one point, Hoffman tried to hand her a note that read: “What’s a good-looking girl like you doing in a corrupt society like this?”
She wrote a book, “Rule 53: Capturing Hippies, Spies, Politicians and Murderers in an American Courtroom,” in which described that and other memorable moments from her career. The rule 53 in the title referred to a federal guideline that kept cameras out of court — and thus kept courtroom sketch artists in business.
There was the time when, at the trial of serial killer John Wayne Gacy, a TV news reporter Ms. Austin was working with asked her to sketch Gacy smiling. It took some work, though, to get Gacy to oblige.
In her book, she wrote: “To catch him smiling, I had to smile at him first. And so I did, persistently, until I caught his eye and his face became transformed with delight. He smiled back, jabbing his attorney and pointing to me. The two of us smiled back at each other like two of the happiest people in the world until the sketch was finished.”
She covered civil trials that involved big names including Michael Jordan and Michael Jackson and criminal trials including the corruption cases of cops, judges and four Illinois governors — Otto Kerner, Dan Walker, George Ryan and Rod Blagojevich.
Once when Chicago gang kingpin Jeff Fort was on trial, she had to manage the reflections from the bulletproof glass in a Cook County courtroom that separated him from spectators at his trial for murder.
On a separate occasion, when Fort was in federal court, an associate told Ms. Austin outside the courtroom, “Jeff say: You draw his wife, he break your legs.”
She did not draw his wife.
An associate of Chicago Outfit mob boss Joey “The Clown” Lombardo once teasingly told her: “You don’t draw me good, I get the full force of organized crime against you.” As she described it: “Luckily, he had a twinkle in his eye.”
An artist, Ms. Austin drew, of course. But she also often wrote notes in the margins of her notepads that reporters would later use to tell that day’s story of what went on in court.
Judges, lawyers and defendants sometimes gave her vain critiques. She’d made them look too heavy in her drawings, they’d say. Or their hairlines weren’t right. And then sometimes they’d buy a copy anyway.
“She was unfailingly elegant, courteous, generous, kind, charming, and she drew pretty good, too,” said fellow courtroom sketch artist L.D. Chukman, who descrobed Ms. Austin as his mentor.
“If it was a prominent trial in Chicago, she was on it,” said Mary Wisniewski, a friend.
Ms. Austin, who was on the board of the Poetry Foundation, loved art, literature and philosophy and made a point of meeting interesting people and having them over for dinner parties.
In 1975, she threw a going-away party for the writer Nelson Algren with a cake that showed the path from Chicago to New Jersey, where he was headed. The cake became ammunition for a food fight that Algren started, according to Wisniewski, who wrote the 2016 biography “Algren: A Life.”
Ms. Austin was born in Boston on July 21,1935, to Eleanor Morris McCormick Collier, a socialite, and Sargent Collier, a photographer.
She attended Vassar College, studied art in Florence, Italy, and spent two years at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law has more than 3,000 of her courtroom sketches in its archives.
Ms. Austin is survived by her daughter Sasha Austin and two grandchildren. A son, John Austin, died in 1976.
A private memorial is being planned.