This disclosure of ‘who’ in contradistinction to ‘what’ somebody is — his qualities, gifts, talents, and shortcomings, which he may display or hide — is implicit in everything somebody says and does. The space of appearance comes into being wherever men are together in the manner of speech and action.

-Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 1958

So, after a long silence, 'I am alone, he breathed at last, opening his lips for the first time in this record.

-Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography, 1928

Evidently: one can win an Emmy for drawing. This cross-media trivia first came to my attention while working with courtroom illustrator Aggie Kenny in 2010 on an experiment in delegated inscription. In the 1970s, Kenny’s sketches of the Watergate trial had been featured on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, and subsequently—her post-medium award. Today, I see a latent juridical quality in any figurative drawing.

Exhibit B: There’s a reason directors George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, at the top of late 20th-century mass media, were so taken with Norman Rockwell, whose illustrations fronted prime early 20th-century press. If Story Drive powers content across our emotion-driven, fact-averse present, drawing seems particularly well-suited to registering the passage of that drive. Perhaps illustration offers submissive freedom? Autonomy (in form) through chosen dependence (in content). After the iconoclasms of the Reformation, Protestant images returned, legitimate only in synthesis with textual explanations securing their messages. But, for all their supposedly specified meanings, these images have eccentric and prolifically evocative forms.

A closing argument: The globeheads reflect a wish for transparency—for the disclosure and appearance of performance; for drawn figures to act and be active, to breathe and open lips—but, on the other hand, this immediacy-wish butts up against the fact that the protocol of drawing is inextricably linked to putting pencil to page—to the point of view of the drawer and the activity of its making. No, you will never be inside me as the first line turns ground into figure, but the traces hung on the walls here are still appearing, in the strong sense.