Is simplification essential in representational painting?

i did this painting of my dog today . I also want to talk some about simplification because I’ve seen many painting instructions emphasizing on it.

in my opinion, Simplification in painting is an overrated formula. All paintings are simplifications of what is painted, regardless how loose or tightly with details it’s painted. If you paint big to small in a sculptural manner, the more simplified it’d be the less time spent on it. I prefer this kind of simplification done without trying to simply. Formulated simplification approach is good too with more stylizations with designed shapes but it’s just one way to paint. I was actually instructed that way. To look for designs to group and simplify, with c , s, curvatures etc. but i ignored it because it wasn’t my cup of tea .

If you look at sculptors , when their clay modeling is in progress it looks very good and can be called done also that way before adding more forms and details. It’s about starting big to small, throwing big pieces of clay and adding or refining to smaller forms and details . They don’t try to design-simplify and model and render into sticking within planned out designs of larger simple forms unless it’s an animation character sculpture or something. Which are nice too. As I’ve mentioned in previous post design-simplification is what ends up happening anyway even though you aren’t trying to design. It’s impossible to get it the same as the subject matter that you are copying from so artists will instinctively use their own design sense . If artists use formulated design techniques they can end up looking similar to one another . Which is very evident if you look at painters that went to same schools teaching that way. But nothing wrong with that either. But using formulated sort of simplification like group up this shape that shape, compress up this and that value etc., as general fundamentals of painting can be a misconception because not all paintings have to be done that way