This 1970s abstracted ink portrait is by Illinois artist Dellard Cassity (1926-2008). Cassity graduated from Washington University in St. Louis with a degree in Fine Art. While internationally recognized artists such as Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly and Victor Vasarely were pioneering the styles of Hard-Edge abstraction and Optical Art in the world's big cities, Dellard Cassity was quietly doing the same in his small town of Litchfield, Illinois, a drastic change from his early academic and post-academic pieces of the 1940s-50s.