Paint the flying spirit of the bird rather than its feathers.
Robert HenriRead
Art when really understood is the province of every human being. It is simply a question of doing things, anything, well. It is not an outside, extra thing.
Interpretation
Art is intrinsic to humanity, requiring only effort and commitment to excel.
This quote by Robert Henri emphasizes that art is a fundamental aspect of being human and accessible to everyone. He suggests that anyone can engage in artistic expression as long as they strive to do their work with care and dedication, implying that the ability to create art is not reserved for a select few but is a universal capacity.
In practice
In a motivational speech about self-expression and creativity.
Paint the flying spirit of the bird rather than its feathers.
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.
At the end of the day it's got to be a good movie, it's got to be a funny movie, and it's got to make people think, 'Hey, I couldn't have spent my time any better.'
All of the significant art of today stems from Conceptual art. This includes the art of installation, political, feminist and socially directed art.
Music is the wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for mankind and makes them spiritually drunken.
It is the only point of getting up every morning: to paint, to make something good, to make something even better than before, not to give up, to compete, to be ambitious.
For the writer, the serial killer is, abstractly, an analogue of the imagination's caprices and amorality; the sense that, no matter the dictates and even the wishes of the conscious social self, the life or will or purpose of the imagination is incomprehensible, unpredictable.
Some writers enjoy writing, I am told. Not me. I enjoy having written.
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