06:51 AM CDT on Thursday, June 8, 2006

By Nancy Holland / 11 News

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You may not know her face or her name, but her work was on television and in the newspapers constantly during the Enron trial.

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Pat Lopez takes you into the courtroom when TV cameras can't.

When photographers can’t go into a courtroom, artist Pat Lopez takes a place on the front row.

This is one artist who has brought many high profile cases to life.

For 61 days you saw them walk in, walk out, walk out, walk in.

But when it came to the drama inside the Enron courtroom, you had to rely on the woman whose name came up at the bottom of the TV screen.

Lopez captured more than 300 scenes at the Enron trial.

And when her work went up on the wall of the federal building it was instantly surrounded by photographers from around the nation.

“Sometimes I don’t even begin to draw until I’ve sat there and observed for an hour or two.  People don’t understand that but it’s so critical to me to tell the story in my drawings,” said courtroom artist Lopez.

For more than 25 years, she has told the stories of some of the biggest cases in U.S. history.

“Kobe Bryant again, the Abu Ghraib prison trial,” she said as she flipped through her portfolio.

From Susan Smith, the first mother accused of drowning her children, to Andrea Yates, her pencils freeze moments in time.

“She was heavily medicated during the trial and I show her sitting there with fingers in her mouth.  She was drooling a little bit,” Lopez said of a portrait of Yates.

There are moments of intense emotion, like the ATF agent testifying about the deadly raid at the home of the Branch Davidians.

She said she tries to divorce herself, while at the same time capturing what is inside people like Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh.

“He had a coldness that really scared me at times.  I try not to look into the eyes of most of the defendants that I cover for one reason only, and that is that if I let down for one moment and allow them to come into my space, then they start posing for me and I have to kind of be invisible,” Lopez said.

If she is invisible, her art certainly is not.

The attorneys in the Enron case were just the latest in a long line who have bought her art at the end of the case.

Her work hangs in some of the most prestigious law offices in the country.

“It’s interesting cause during the breaks, they hint that I need to add some more hair or lose some chin, you know.  And, I always say if I had a nickel for every time a lawyer asked me that I’d be a wealthy woman,” said Lopez. 

She is rich in experience.

Take Whitewater, a sitting president, a televised deposition and a juror wearing a Star Trek uniform.

Lopez is experienced in catching the richness of detail as in the tattoos of James King, convicted of the Jasper dragging death of James Byrd.

Pat Lopez is currently writing a book.  It will have her drawings and recollections of almost 30 years of trials.

Meanwhile, she’ll be back for the second Andrea Yates case, back drawing us in to the story of American justice.