Simplicity with Portraiture

Last class we discussed how to go about seeing simply as a painter. Simplifying what you are looking at is an acquired skill and takes considerable practice before it becomes second nature.
Why simplifying helps:

• It helps you identify what’s important and what’s not important (to you, the artist). This may help the artist immediately identify what he/she likes, or what he/she doesn't like about something, or what is meaningful about what’s being observed.

• It helps you identify when you are done with the current task and when to consciously begin the next task. This will have you identify the stages of a painting more easily, making short-order of them and – while doing so – exposing the process in which you’re working. It simply helps you identify when you have finished what you set out to accomplish before moving on to the next task.

• It helps you identify your issues. It keeps you clear and honest with yourself so that you may clearly identify your issues and strengths as as a painter. Learning how to solve your own problems is an integral part of discovering your process as an artist.

• It helps you make honest and clear decisions.

No matter which way you slice it, there is a good argument to be made for simplicity and its uses. Aesthetically, it's an age old philosophical argument as to what makes something more beautiful – simplicity or complexity. Ultimately, it is up to you the artist. But it is without question that simplifying works from a painter’s perspective and that it is a tactic employed by many of the greats throughout history. The next time you look at a master painting, see if you can detect how the artist may have gone about simplifying what you are looking at. It’s not too hard to do – but if you can, you’ll begin to decipher the language of painting.

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Here's some philosophy on Simplicity & Complexity (if you’re interested):
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/simplicity/

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor

Occam's razor ("law of parsimony") is the problem-solving principle that, when presented with competing hypothetical answers to a problem, one should select the one that makes the fewest assumptions. The idea is attributed to William of Ockham (c. 1287–1347), who was an English Franciscan friar, scholastic philosopher, and theologian.
In science, Occam's razor is used as an heuristic guide in the development of theoretical models, rather than as a rigorous arbiter between candidate models.[1][2] In the scientific method, Occam's razor is not considered an irrefutable principle of logic or a scientific result; the preference for simplicity in the scientific method is based on the falsifiability criterion. For each accepted explanation of a phenomenon, there may be an extremely large, perhaps even incomprehensible, number of possible and more complex alternatives. Since one can always burden failing explanations with ad hoc hypotheses to prevent them from being falsified, simpler theories are preferable to more complex ones because they are more testable.[3][4][5]

principle (or law) of parsimony

phrase of parsimony
1. the scientific principle that things are usually connected or behave in the simplest or most economical way, especially with reference to alternative evolutionary pathways.