With a six day deadline, POLITICO Europe asked me to make an editorial artwork presenting a portrait of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen for the cover of the January 11, 2024 issue, which was published and hits newsstands in Europe today. While it wasn’t a given that the resulting artwork would be a Woven Portrait—Deputy Production Editor Arnau Busquets Guàrdia and I discussed some other options—it was ultimately the path we agreed on. And so, after I finished some other unlrelated work I happened to be doing last week, I dove into this.
This piece is made in the style of Woven Portrait of Julius Caesar I made for National Geographic in 2021, published 2022 (no comparison intended between the two subjects). While for this project the original photographs were sourced due to time and budgetary constraints, the rest of the process was quite similar. However, in the case of this portrait of von der Leyen, I converted the three comprising photographs into cyan, magenta, and yellow tonal ranges respectively, and cut the prints into 12mm strips. Caesar’s comprising photographs (taken by me) had been converted into red, green, and blue tonal ranges, and its prints were cut into 15mm strips, as had Unknown (American)’s. I backlit the physical woven composite object with 4000K light, as I had with Unknown (American), whereas Caesar had been backlit with 3000K and from a greater distance.
I’m happy that the piece fits the tone of the article (by Barbara Moens, Carlo Martuscelli, Clea Calucutt, and Jacopo Barigazzi), as intended, and that, considering the labor-laden nature of the process, such a short turnaround is not only possible, I think with some tricks learned this time around as well as a slightly clearer schedule, it could be even been produced even more quickly.
You can see a digital version of the January 11 issue of the magazine here. The web version of the article is here.
(I’m waiting on the hardcopies to reach New York from Brussels. When they arrive, I’ll photograph them and update this post with their images.)
