A Quote by Robert Henri

Paint the flying spirit of the bird rather than its feathers. — © Robert Henri
Paint the flying spirit of the bird rather than its feathers.
It was a bird. A bird struggling through stickiness: a bird coated in paint, floundering in its nest, splashing color everywhere. Red. Red. Red. Dozens of them: black feathers coated thickly with crimson-colored paint, fluttering among the branches. Red means run.
In painting feathers, you want to create the look of feathers, but if you try to paint all the feathers, you have nothing but disaster.
I've been told that some members of Congress disagree with my tax cut proposal. Well, you know it's been said that taxation is the art of plucking feathers without killing the bird. It's time they realized the bird just doesn't have any feathers left.
Without feathers it isn't easy to fly: my wings have got no feathers. [Lat., Sine pennis volare hau facilest: meae alae pennas non habent.] [Alt., Flying without feathers is not easy; my wings have no feathers.]
Flying without feathers is not easy: my wings have no feathers.
A few days back someone sent me two feathers. Two bird's feathers in a sheet of note-paper with a coronet, and fastened with a seal. Sent from a place a long way off; from one who need not have sent them back at all. That amused me too, those devilish green feathers.
My father used to say: Every bird is one bird, and every book is one book, and every bird and every book is one thing too, under the words and the feathers." He finished with a flourish, as though the meaning of this was self-evident.
A bird painted not with beauty but with all the dirt and wounds collected in a long hard life, in battle, in love, with torn feathers and a busted leg and a chipped beak and one of its eyes half closed; and yet a bird of deeper loveliness for all of that.
As we're leaving the King's Arms Hotel after Sunday lunch, I watch a beautiful white dove walking down the wet road. A car approaches and the bird accidentally turns into the wheel rather than away from it. A gentle crunch. The car passes. A shape like a discarded napkin left in the road. Still perfectly white, no red stains, but bearing no relation anymore to the shape of a bird. A trail of white feathers flutter down the road after the car. The suddeness is very upsetting. That gentle crunch.
What is joy? It is a bird That we all want to catch. It is the same bird That we all love to see flying.
I think hawking is the nearest thing to flying in this world. There you sit high up and poised light as air, the horse swift beneath you. You unhood your bird, let the jesses go and watch your falcon, its bells a-jingle, like some wild spirit take the air... and your own spirit goes with it.
We can love religion as we need rituals, but The Holy Spirit is a bird, free to fly and land where it likes. We don't actually need 'religion' in order to have a relationship with The Holy Spirit. Too many wars an violence over religion.We need to see it's all the same spirit and we are part of that spirit so we shouldn't be fighting over what name we call it. It's a free bird.
I don't have feathers, but I feel like a bird sometimes.
If a bird is used to flying and you put in a a cage, it won't be a happy bird; It wants to fly; that's its nature. Your nature is infinite awareness.
My thing is about following the accidental, more than trying to paint an accurate bowl of apples. I enjoy most following the paint. It leads me somewhere else. I think I enjoy just letting the magic unfold and letting the spirit of the paint tell me where we're going.
Praises for our past triumphs are as feathers to a dead bird.
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