"From the start--apparently--he had found the center from which all other work was to find its only possible 'measure'. But 'measure'--not in a sense of ranking but in the sense of realizing almost year by year the feeling of being alive--within the face and hands largely--to register the penetrations of the life lived and living.... What moves us--and will always move the living--is the weird exactitude by which he shows us--makes us see--that we are hopelessly, helplessly mortal...yet that somewhere--at core--heart's intelligence--there is the light that being alive persists in extending.
His obduracy and courage, his candor and the verity of it, are witnessed in the most unswerving hand. And his work, his life, brings home to us what we must still most learn: that there is no artist except the artist of life, that there is no life without the art to realize and share it."