"Days she looks at floors, a thick degrading cloud crosses her face for minutes and I think of wheat." ("Indian Girl" from What Thou Lovest Well, Remains America. 1975)

Jim Todd knew Dick Hugo fairly well from his days as a faculty member at the University of Montana. Of all the portraits in the Montana Portrait Series this one evoked the greatest personal feeling for the artist as he felt a sure sense of the personality of the poet and writer. The challenge of Hugo's portrait rested upon the heaviness of his face. By confining his attention to the features rather than the entire head, Todd emphasized the essential elements which define Hugo's character. To the artist, the writer had seemed earthy yet fragile and possessed of an exquisite sensitivity. In Hugo's piercing gaze we sense the apprehension of the vulnerable; in the creases of this soft, timeworn face is an awareness of the human condition, a sense of having been wherever it is we might also have been.

--Margaret Mudd (Montana Portraits, Rattlesnake Valley Press, 1991, Missoula, Montana)

It does not seem possible that Richard Hugo died in 1982, such is the power of his memory among Missoulians. Born in Seattle in 1923, Hugo studied under Theodore Roethke at the University of Washington where he earned his MA. He served as a bombardier in Italy during 1943, and writes that he returned to Italy in 1963, hoping to find the same sad landscape. Whether written of Italy, Scotland, or Montana, his poetry is powerful and evocative. Hugo served as director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Montana and was on the faculty there from 1964 until his death.

--Bryan Spellman, (Montana Portraits, Rattlesnake Valley Press, 1991, Missoula, Montana)