oetic painter.
He had learned early for so young a man what were his special
idealistic fervors. He had the true romanticist's gift for
refinements, and was working continually toward the rarer states of
being out from the emotional into the intellectual, through spiritual
application into the proper and requisite calm. He lived in a
thoroughly ordered world of specified experience which is typified in
his predilection for the superiority of Chinese notions of beauty over
the more sentimental rhythms of the Greeks. He had found the proper
shade of intellectuality he cared for in this type of Oriental
expression. It was the Buddhistic feeling of reality that gave him
more than the platonic. He was searching for a majesty beyond
sensuousness, by which sensuous experience is transformed into greater
and more enduring shades of beauty. He wanted the very life of beauty
to take the place of sensuous suggestion. Realities in place of
semblances, then, he was eager for, but the true visionary realities
as far finer than the materialistic reality.

He had learned early that he was not, and never would be, the
fantasist that some of his earlier canvases indicate. Even his essays
in portraiture, verging on the realistic, leaned nevertheless more
toward the imaginative reality always. He knew, also, with clarity,
the fine line of decision between imagination and vision, between the
dramatic and the lyric, and had realized completely the supremacy of
the lyric in himself. He was a young boy of light walking on a man's
strong feet upon real earth over which there was no shadow for him. He
walked straightforwardly toward the elysium of his own very personal
organized fancies. His irrigation ditches were "young rivers" for him,
rivers of being, across which white youths upon white horses, and
white fawns were gliding to the measure of their own delights. He had,
this young boy of light, the perfect measure of poetic accuracy
coupled with a man's fine simplicity in him. He had the priceless calm
for the understanding of his own poetic ecstasies. They acted upon him
gently with their own bright pressure. He let them thrive according to
their own relationships to himself. Nothing was forced in the mind and
soul of Rex Slinkard. He was in quest of the modern rapture for
permanent things such as is to be found in "L'apres midi d'un Faun" of
Mallarme and Debussy for instance, in quest of those rare, whiter
proportions of experience. It was