It is all a fine clear testimony to the certainty of youth, perhaps the only certainty there can be. He was the calm declaimer of the life of everlasting beauty. He saw with a glad eye the "something" that is everywhere at all times, and in all places, for the poet's and the visionary's eye at least. He was sure of what he saw; his paintings and drawings are a firm conviction of that. Like all who express themselves clearly, he wanted to say all he had to say. At thirty he had achieved expression remarkably. He had found the way out, and the way out was toward and into the light. He was clear, and entirely unshadowed. This is Rex Slinkard, ranchman, poet-painter, and man of the living world. Since he could not remain, he has left us a carte visite of rarest clarity and beauty. We who care, among the few, for things in relation to essences, are glad Rex Slinkard lived and laughed and wondered, and remained the little while. The new silence is but a phase of the same living one he covered all things with. He was glad he was here. He was another angle of light on the poetic world around us, another unsuspected facet of the bright surface of the world. Surfaces were for him, too, something to be "deepened" with a fresh vividness. He had the irresistible impulse to decorate and to decorate consistently. His sense of decoration was fluid and had no hint of the rhetorical in it. He felt everything joined together, shape to shape, by the harmonic insistence in life and in nature. A flower held a face, and a face held a flowery substance for him. Bodies were young trees in bloom, and trees were lines of human loveliness. The body of the man, the body of the woman, beautiful male and female bodies, the ideal forms of everyone and everything he encountered, he understood and made his own. They were all living radiances against the dropped curtain of the world. He loved the light on flesh, and the shadows on strong arms, legs, and breasts. He avoided theory, either philosophic or esthetic. He had traveled through the ages of culture in his imagination, and was convinced that nothing was new and nothing was old. It was all living and eternal when it was genuine. He stepped out of the world of visible realities but seldom, and so it was, books and methods of interpretation held little for him. He didn't need them, for he held the whole world in his arms through the power of dream and vision. He touched life everywhere, touched it with himself.