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.
Cruelty in the theatre is unrelenting decisiveness, diligence, strictness.
Burlesque girls were alchemists. They were steel-tough performers who were willing to use kitchens as dressing rooms, haul their costume bags through the snow, and go into debt over fake diamonds, all for the five minutes onstage when they were goddesses.
I'm not so facile that I can accomplish or find out what I want to know or explore enough of the possibilities and a way of making a painting, say, in just one painting or two paintings.
It has taken me years of struggle, hard work and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence.
You paint what you know best; what you went through as a teenager and child. My world is the one I got to know in Medellin; I never paint anything else other than that.
Writers should provoke disagreement.
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