When a Santa Fean loses her life savings to Bernie Madoff, said Marcia Cohen, the natural reaction is to turn to art.

"It's therapy," Cohen said. "You know how you get to Santa Fe — I'm sure this has happened to you or people you know — and you suddenly turn into an artist? ...

"I was scribbling with charcoal in a little book and using some other pencils. I wasn't taking it too seriously."

One result was a "hideous" 18-by-14-inch drawing of Madoff as a lizard or dragon with claws, a tail and a long, forked tongue, and gold coming out of his eyes.

Another was Madoff riding a pig labeled "SEC."

Cohen and her husband, Larry Cohen, now live in Eldorado, but for years she lived on Manhattan's Upper West Side — "where all we seedy reporters and intellectuals live" — and worked for the New York Daily News, freelanced for The New York Times and others, and wrote a 1988 history of "the golden age of feminism" called The Sisterhood.

She said she began investing with Madoff because her accountant — whose father-in-law, she later learned, had once been Madoff's partner — told her, "This is a nice, safe place. It doesn't make a lot, but it's a nice steady income. You're a poor little writer. What the hell?"

Cohen said she never met Madoff, but visited his office in the "Lipstick Building" to sign up and initially was so pleased with her 10 percent annual interest that she sold her apartment, invested the proceeds with Madoff and lived off the returns. "I thought I was retired," she said. Last year, she was among thousands who discovered their savings had evaporated in a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme.

Last March, Madoff pleaded guilty to 11 felonies, was sentenced to 150 years and is now in a federal prison in North Carolina. Various attempts are under way to salvage Madoff's assets, such as an auction of his collections of sports memorabilia, furs and jewelry, including an 18-karat gold Monoblocco Rolex watch valued at up to $87,500, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Cohen, who is in her 70s, said she doubts she will ever see a penny returned, no longer cares where Madoff is or what he's doing, and blames the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for the fiasco. "They said over and over, after many people pointed out to them that this couldn't be good, they told us as little investors — and, believe me, I'm a little investor — that Madoff was safe and good, thereby sucking in an enormous number of people," she said. "They told The Wall Street Journal that Madoff had passed all inspections."

Madoff isn't Cohen's only portraiture subject. She did Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Kate Millett, Germaine Greer and other feminist leaders when she was working on The Sisterhood. Some of these portraits were exhibited at Wells Fargo Bank in Santa Fe in 2005. Nine are on the cover of a new edition of her book being published by Sunstone Press of Santa Fe this month.

Contact Tom Sharpe at 986-3080 or tsharpe@sfnewmexican.com.