Technique Versus Form (KV)

​Is one of the main lessons of Dow the lesson that form is not technique? The forms in nature, for example -- spirals, rings, curls, branchings --are not technique, but nature doing its thing with innate harmony. Technique involves copying, to acquire a set of skills to "reproduce" something. Perhaps one of the wrong turns in Western art is to conflate form and technique. After all, for the longest time "art" translated "technē." 

   In Leonardo, nearly all the effort goes into technē: my, how he did the robes! the flowers! the perspective! --


But the whole seems to me didactic  and lifeless, a demonstration, leaving not much to the imagination and no room for the soul to enter. But those blurry forms in the background were always what interested me most as a kid, because they suggested a kind of infinity:



Look at the perfection of form in these details -- yet undidactic, undemonstrative, just there! The modern artist ventures to restore to us this more primal and innocent way of seeing, in which the sense for form is reached for, rather than the acquisition of technique through teaching. The former is harder and subtler.

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