Paint the flying spirit of the bird rather than its feathers.
Interpretation
Focus on the essence and emotion of a subject rather than just its surface details.
This quote encourages artists and creators to capture the true spirit and energy of their subjects instead of getting lost in the minutiae. By emphasizing the 'flying spirit' of the bird, Henri suggests that the emotional and dynamic qualities of an object are far more important than its physical attributes.
In practice
In a workshop on painting, the instructor might say this quote to inspire students to express their unique perspectives.
Know what the old masters did. Know how they composed their pictures, but do not fall into the conventions they established. These conventions were right for them, and they are wonderful. They made their language. You make yours. All the past can help you.
The sketch hunter moves through life as he finds it, not passing negligently the things he loves, but stopping to know them, and to note them down in the shorthand of his sketchbook.
You form a society: that limits you. Adopt a name, and you've limited yourself again; draw up a constitution and bylaws and you've made a groove, a rut, that hampers your growth. You think you can fix your course and move straight along it. But sometimes the important thing is to strike out sidewise.
After all, the goal is not making art. It is living a life. Those who live their lives will leave the stuff that is really art.
Do not let the fact that things are not made for you, that conditions are not as they should be stop you. Go on anyway. Everything depends on those who go on anyway.
Drawing is not following a line on the model, it is drawing your sense of the thing.
I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me - shapes and ideas so near to me - so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn't occurred to me to put them down.
I think the purpose of a piece of music is significant when it actually lives in somebody else. A composer puts down a code, and a performer can activate the code in somebody else. Once it lives in somebody else, it can live in others as well.
Street art, of course, is political, because it's illegal, so the very act of doing it is an act of defiance.
I don't start a novel until I have lived with the story for awhile to the point of actually writing an outline and after a number of books I've learned that the more time I spend on the outline the easier the book is to write. And if I cheat on the outline I get in trouble with the book.
Most musicians remain poor. But the music that they make, even if it does not bring them millions, gives millions of people happiness.
Prose is not to be read aloud but to oneself alone at night, and it is not quick as poetry but rather a gathering web of insinuations ... Prose should be a long intimacy between strangers with no direct appeal to what both may have known. It should slowly appeal to feelings unexpressed, it should in the end draw tears out of the stone.
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