‘My picture didn’t look anything like her’ – Swift sketcher opens up
The court artist Jeff Kandyba upset Taylor Swift’s fans with his drawings of the star. He tells Will Pavia what went wrong.
What does Taylor Swift look like? Jeff Kandyba had puzzled over that question for most of this month. Sketching her face in court last week, he thought he had nailed it. Yet after he had finished the job in pastel and rushed the sketch outside for the waiting camera crews, ‘‘It just didn’t look like her’’, he said.
He had spent a week trying to plot her features, but her face seemed devoid of prominent ones on which he might hang a portrait. There is no shortage of photographs on the internet, but ‘‘she’s always flashing a million-dollar smile,’’ he said. ‘‘When you are getting sued in a federal court, you are not doing a whole lot of smiling.’’
Kandyba, 63, is an illustrator and graphic designer. He is also the main courtroom artist for the city of Denver, Colorado, sketching the good, the bad and the ugly in pastel as they face justice. Earlier this month, however, he received the court artist’s equivalent of a commission to paint the Sistine Chapel.
Swift, goddess of pop music and the internet, would appear in Denver to fight a lawsuit. A local DJ had grabbed her bottom in 2013. She had complained, he had been fired. Then he sued her and she counter-sued. Now the whole messy contretemps was to be heard before the federal court.
Cameras are not allowed inside federal courtrooms and thus, for perhaps the first time in her adult life, Swift would be appearing in a public place without a throng of photographers. Kandyba and his pastels alone would be responsible for conveying the picture of her plight to the world.
Unfortunately, the world would not be happy with what it got. The courtroom was packed with Swift fans, and more were waiting outside as Kandyba’s first portrait of the singer was broadcast. ‘‘They were happy to tell me that I was being beaten up on social media,’’ he said.
‘‘I swear to God, I don’t know what happened. I agree with them. My picture didn’t look anything like her. When I sketched it I thought it did, but sometimes when you are done with the colours, and so on, the whole thing changes.’’
At the beginning of this month he received a call from the Associated Press (AP) news agency, booking him for two days of the Swift case. Celebrity cases are dreadfully nerve-racking for court artists. ‘‘Everyone knows what she looks like, so I knew it was going to be tough.’’
He began practising. ‘‘She has really unusual eyes,’’ he says. When I was doing practice sketches my wife pointed out that I was giving her more of a curve under her eyes. My wife said she didn’t see that at all.’’ He made the line straighter and the geometry of Swift’s face ‘‘started making more sense to me,’’ he said.
‘‘Her mouth and her eyes are her most distinctive features. She doesn’t have real prominent cheekbones. Her chin is pretty pointed, I guess. It’s not a square jawline, but it’s very critical to get just the right curves there. Even subtle differences there are completely critical.’’
When proceedings began, ‘‘I was 30 feet [10 metres] from Taylor Swift,’’ he said. This is why he had brought binoculars.
‘‘That’s difficult too, trying to look at someone through binoculars for a few moments and then sketch.’’
The big day was last Friday, when Swift was due to take the stand. Kandyba did not eat all day.
He was pretty confident this time. In the gallery, one of the fans had been bluntly critical of his previous efforts. Now, ‘‘the same guy came by and said, ’Well, I don’t think anyone is going to be too unhappy about that one.’ I had gotten better.’’
After an hour, Swift stepped down and the judge called a recess. Kandyba rushed out to the front of the courthouse where an area had been fenced off to hold the photographers and television crews. He laid his picture on the lid of an equipment case. ‘‘There must have been two dozen people lined up to shoot it.’’ he says. Other reporters pulled out their smartphones to take snaps, like tourists in the Louvre crowding around the Mona Lisa.
By the time they had all finished, Kandyba had missed any chance of eating lunch. But his picture was appearing all over the world. There it was in the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, in La Nacion in Buenos Aires. ‘‘It kind of blows me away,’’ he said.
None of his three children reads newspapers or watches the news on television, he says. But even they had seen his work. At a family get-together days later, his youngest daughter offered a rave review. ‘‘She was like, ’Oh my God, you are all over the internet. There isn’t anyone under 30 that doesn’t know who you are’.’’
– The Times