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.
It would be difficult for me not to conclude that the most perfect type of masculine beauty is Satan, as portrayed by Milton.
The art is long, life is short
If you want your writing to be taken seriously, don't marry and have kids, and above all, don't die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that.
It is possible, however, that the artist is both thin-skinned and prophetic and, like the canary lowered into the mine shaft to test the air, has caught a whiff of something lethal.
Life comes before literature, as the material always comes before the work. The hills are full of marble before the world blooms with statues.
By and large, most of the work that we see in the great museums throughout the world are populated with people who don't happen to look like me.
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