Abstraction from study of natural forms

For this exercise, I wandered around my garden to find natural forms that interested me. 

My original sketch was a very brief line drawing of an area comprising an arrow-leafed plant with pink flower and grasses in the foreground.  I was attracted to this mainly because of the combination of the lines of the grasses diverging across the picture plain.  

The second sketch I simplified slightly, just picking out some of the lines of the grasses and simplifying (and repeating) the shape of the leaves.

The third sketch I began to experiment with further simplification (just picking out some lines and ignoring others) and colour (pastel pencils).  I firstly used more earthy, neutral hues of brown, yellow and orange (autumnal colours) and then moved towards the blue end of the spectrum. Originally, this was as a contrast, but then I felt that a more monochrome approach may work well, especially if concentrating on the linear aspects of the study.  I felt the left-hand side of the sketch was more interesting (see the line down the centre of the sketch), particularly the bottom corner with the jagged blue and white colouring, which I felt could possibly be expressed by texture or impasto/textured paint.

I was originally going to create a new canvas with texture gel, but when in my studio, saw one of the canvases I had created from a previous exercise (dripping/pouring), which already had a raised, linear texture and so decided to use this as the base to my abstraction.  The pink/red raised globules also reminded me of the flowers of the plant I had originally sketched.

I began adding broad strokes of blue and white to the canvas (landscape orientation) and then progressed just by adding colour, scumbling over the previous layers, sometimes working with the raised layer of thicker paint.  At this point, I decided I didn’t particularly like the white over the textured ground – it was too harsh and removed most of the interest in the canvas and so I decided to work on the opposite side.  As I had already used masking tape down the canvas to hold it to the board, I decided to leave this on to see what the effect would be when removed.  Once the tape was removed, I added further paint to this area but still leaving the harsh lines as a contrast to the swirls and more organic forms.

This painting is more abstract than I was planning originally, but I think that when you decide to use a highly textured and abstract background, you do need to explore and investigate the marks that are already on your canvas, rather than working against them.