Shadows

To see volume you need light on the subject - and shadows. But shadow is the absence of light, says the artist David Hockney. Great photographers, and cinematographers are not just aware of shadows, they use them to create dramatic effect and illusions. Interestingly, shadows are almost exclusively an European artistic phenomenon: there are virtually no shadows in Chinese art, nor Persian or Japanese. Continues Hockney, they [shadows] are  one of the things that make the major difference between Western art and the art of anywhere else. However, some of the images of pre-historic cave paintings in France, and elsewhere, are a sort of stencil, akin to a shadow because it is simply an outline, a negative formed by the absence of paint.