Early this month, The Atlantic commissioned me to produce a Woven Portrait of Vice President J.D. Vance. It will appear in the July 2025 printed issue of the magazine (which should hit newsstands June 17), and is available online now. The portrait accompanies George Packer’s profile of said VP and his savvy if cunning rise to power.
As with other portraits of high-profile individuals that have been completed on a tight timeline, I made many mockups using sourced photographs, and ultimately the publication licensed the photos for me to work with. But as a departure from others, for this Woven Portrait I selected an off-key warm palette. While in the past I’ve mainly gravitated towards weaving together three photos respectively printed with red, green, and blue bents, or respectively printed with cyan, magenta, and yellow bents (or in fact not just a bent but full monochrome conversion to R, G, and B or C, M, and Y tonal ranges), here I wove together one photo that had been leaned towards a red tonal scale, one that had been leaned towards a magenta tonal scale, and one that had been leaned towards a yellow tonal scale. To me this seemed to hint at a character that runs hot rather than cool, more likely to inflame than soothe.
As usual, I cut the three comprising photos into 10mm-wide strips and wove them together. Before I began the physical processing of the artwork, Art Director Paul Spella had sent me a layout mockup of the printed article that had the opening typography positioned to the right of the printed part of the woven artwork. So I made the physical artwork with a generous blank woven area to the right of the printed section to accommodate it. The generous blank woven areas above and below the printed section are an artifact of the printing process that I expected to be cropped out (and ultimately were), but in the final file I sent to Paul, I left them in as a salute to the weaving process and just in case they served a purpose for The Atlantic’s online display of the image.
