«Some people are just much easier to draw than others. If you give me somebody with a beard and glasses, bingo, got it.»
This week, the big Taylor Swift news is that a Colorado jury sided with Swift in her courtroom battle against the former radio host David Mueller, ruling that Mueller assaulted Swift in a backstage photo op in 2013. But there’s been an interesting side plot: The emergence of courtroom artist Jeff Kandyba, who has been sketching the trial since it started and who, at least according to Swift’s online fanbase, is really bad at drawing Taylor Swift.
Kandyba, from Boulder, has apparently been the go-to courtroom artist in the Denver area since the ’80s. And talking to Denver’s Fox 31, he says, “A person like Taylor Swift, who is very pretty — has perfectly proportioned dimensions on the face — is actually much harder [to sketch].” The many, many Tumblrs full of Swift fan art might disagree. Also: “It’s hard. Some people are just much easier to draw than others. If you give me somebody with a beard and glasses, bingo, got it.”
Some Swift fans have wondered if Kandyba has been drawing unflattering portraits of Swift because he’s been siding with Mueller during the trial, and Kandyba, speaking with Westword, scoffs at that idea: “I don’t have a horse in either of those races… I don’t listen to either of them. I know who they are, and I think they both seem like really fine individuals. But I don’t have a preference either way. Taylor Swift fans think that because of my drawings, I must not like her, and it’s not like that at all.”
Kandyba would also like you to know that his job isn’t easy: “I’m probably sitting 35 feet away from her looking through binoculars — and if you’ve ever tried to draw anything looking through binoculars, it’s not the easiest thing in the world. You go more for resemblance, and hopefully you can at least get that.”
He would also like you to stop emailing him: “I just want those emails off me.”
This article was originally published by: Stereogum.
