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.
Write because you love it and not because it is something that you think you should do. Always write about something or somebody you know about - something that you feel deeply and passionately about. Never try and force it.
Drama can feel like therapy whereas comedy feels like there's been a pressure and a weight lifted off of you. You come to work and you laugh all day, you go home and you feel light and there's a certain feeling when you're sitting with the audience and they leave after 90 minutes and it's just pure escapism and they're happy.
True ornament is not a matter of prettifying externals. It is organic with the structure it adorns, whether a person, a building, or a park. At its best it is an emphasis of structure, a realization in graceful terms of the nature of that which is ornamented
Great things do not just happen by impulse, _x000D_ but as a succession of small things linked together.
The system is the work of art; the visual work of art is the proof of the System. The visual aspect can't be understood without understanding the system. It isn't what it looks like but what it is that is of basic importance.
music, drawing, books, invention & exercise will be so many resources to you against ennui.
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