Courtroom sketch artist made mark in local case

Claudia van Koba was born with both a gift and a curse. She has spent the rest of her life finding ways for the two to coexist.

The gift is a remarkable ability to draw portraits, and draw them quickly. But that talent is gradually being eroded by the inherited downside — a condition known as “essential tremor” that is causing van Koba’s hands to shake.

Slideshow - Claudia van Koba talks about her work

Most recently, both hands.

“It was always mostly in my right,” she said, “so I learned to draw and paint with my left. Now, though, it’s getting harder and harder to draw a straight line.”

All of this lends an immediacy and a poignancy to an exhibition of van Koba’s courtroom sketches at the Academy of Fine Arts on Friday.

“It was my son Nicholas who first suggested this,” said van Koba, who teaches art at Tye River Elementary School in Nelson County. “When Jerry Falwell died, he called me from Alaska, where he’s a salmon fisherman, and said, ‘Don’t you have those drawings somewhere from the Falwell-Flynt trial?’ I said, ‘Yes, but I have no idea where they are.’”

Eventually she rooted them out, along with sketches from a number of other local trials. One thing led to another, and Ted Batts of the Academy asked her to pull enough of them together for an exhibit.

If you’ve lived in Central Virginia for long, you’ve probably seen Claudia van Koba at work — but not in a courtroom. For years, she was a fixture at River Ridge mall, her left hand flying as she formed loops and lines and curves into an uncanny image of the person sitting in the chair next to her.

“They call it ‘street art,’” she said, “and I’ve been doing it since I was 11. I’m not sure where it came from, but there are days when I feel unstoppable. When I finish a sketch, I’ll tell the person: ‘I nailed you.’”

A native of Ohio, van Koba first honed her craft at the Cedar Point Amusement Park. Later, after marrying and moving to Virginia, she moved into malls.

“I did go to art school, too,” she said. “One day we were drawing a live model, and I finished my sketch in about five minutes. The teacher practically knocked people out of the way getting over to where I was. He looked at me and said, ‘You’re a street artist, aren’t you?’ I said, ‘Is that bad?’”

The courtroom sketching started by accident.

“Rhonda Augustine, whose husband Al worked for WDBJ, saw me at the mall and suggested me,” van Koba recalled. “Nobody else was doing it, and that was before they let cameras into the courtrooms. I heard that one station had one of their cameramen drawing stick figures.”

Her first trial was in Lynchburg in 1983 — that of Greg Dodl, convicted of the murder of his ex-girlfriend and the new man she was seeing.

“It’s different from mall sketching in a lot of ways,” van Koba said. “If you’ve got a kid in your chair, you can move his head around to get the best angle. Obviously, you can’t do that with a subject in a courtroom.”

The Falwell-Larry Flynt judicial circus held in Roanoke in December 1984 was probably the high point of van Koba’s career as a court chronicler.

“Falwell would never turn his head so I could capture him,” she said, “but there was one time when he did, and I took advantage. The next day, coming into the courtroom, he said: ‘You got me.’ That was fun.”

A not-so-pleasant memory is of the woman who plopped down in her chair at a Tidewater mall.

“I told her, ‘You can’t sit there — that’s for my customers,” van Koba said, “and she started gasping for breath. Turns out she was having a heart attack.”

In 2006, van Koba returned to the same federal courthouse where she had sketched Falwell and Flynt, this time to cover the embezzlement trial of former Lynchburg mayor Carl B. Hutcherson for The News & Advance. That was her last gig as a court artist.

Besides numerous sketches of the Dodl and Falwell/Flynt trial, van Koba’s portolio for the Academy exhibition represents a number of other Central Virginia cases. One that haunts her is a full-on rendering of Douglas Buchanan, later executed for the murder of his father, stepmother and two stepbrothers in 1987.

“What I got from him,” she said, “was this sense of overwhelming sadness. In a lot of ways, I think, a good sketch can reveal more about a person than a photograph.

“I just hope I can keep doing it.”