Roberto Parada
“I’m a huge Gilbert Stuart fan,” says Roberto Parada, the Virginia-based artist who created the cover image for a story about the legacy of George W. Bush (“The Test of Time,”). “I saw his retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art about two years ago, and I really admire his technique.” Parada, who has contributed to Esquire, Rolling Stone, and Entertainment Weekly, studied Stuart’s famous unfinished painting of George Washington—which, known as the Athenaeum portrait, is the inspiration for the image on the dollar bill—and changed the face to the current president. The tricky part was getting the correct lighting and making the canvas look old. “It took a number of evolutions,” Parada says, “but I wanted people to get the reference. The painting is a good metaphor for the story.”
Jake Silverstein
In the five months since senior editor Jake Silverstein joined the masthead of texas monthly, he has edited stories about violent teenagers, horse slaughter, spurs, brain cancer, coal plants, and NASCAR and brought on board such columnists as Abraham Verghese and Antonya Nelson. For this issue, he interviewed H. W. Brands, Michael Lind, and Niall Ferguson for the cover story, “The Test of Time.” Though Silverstein grew up on the West Coast (he was born and raised in California) and got his start on the East Coast at Harper’s Magazine (where he remains a contributing editor), he happily settled in Texas in 1999. “What I like most is the particular sense of humor,” he says. “As Frank Dobie used to say, it’s a brew that suits my tooth.”
LeAnn Mueller
If photographer LeAnn Mueller, the granddaughter of Texas barbecue legend Louie Mueller, hadn’t decided to join the yearbook staff in high school, there’s a chance that today she’d be smoking ribs instead of snapping photos. Funny how fate works. For this month’s issue, the Taylor native traveled to six cities to shoot a cast of one-hit wonders (“The Songs Remain the Same,”). No stranger to making musicians pose—Epic and Sony records are regular clients, and her work has appeared in Rolling Stone and URB—Mueller proved the perfect choice to track down the former stars. “You can tell they really enjoy themselves, and they just love telling stories.”
