Artists often like to reduce organic forms to something simpler, to make them easier to grasp, and reducing the complex, rounded surfaces of the human body to a relatively small number of planes can greatly clarify its relationship to space and to light. Similarly, when we apply light to a figure, a strong light will make the patterns of light and dark clearer than a diffuse one. For realist artists at least, the important thing is understanding what happens in nature so that we can…
