This haunting self portrait was one of Victor Willing's last paintings. Although the painting is titled with the artist at age 70, he did not live that long. Willing had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1966 and he died the year after this was painted at age 60. The artist once said that, "beneath even the desire to change society and the need to communicate is a need, urgent in some of us, to affirm our scratches that 'I exist'.