Blurring the Lines~ Abstract or Figurative? Decim8,TangledFX, ImageBlender...

Today the opening image was described by a revered iPhone photographer and art educator, as more of a "Figurative" image when I posted it in an abstract on line iPhone group.
(He was not criticizing, just saying.)
I am an not an art educator by degree, although I have done a lot of studying, so I deferred. However, I am an MBA, who loves art and loves to analyze.......
So, is this a "Figurative" image instead of an "Abstract" image? Hmmm, that made me think, which is a good thing! It also made me wonder about the new process of image creation with the iPhone and all the cool and crazy apps we have to distort reality! This image was NOT created from a sunflower, now there is my question...If we create an image from a source image and the final image, does not  have any recognizable features from the original source image: is it still "Figurative" because it looks like a recognizable subject in our mind?
Here I took an image which had nothing to do with the "perceived" reality of the final image and "reversed engineered" so to speak an image which to me was abstract, but had a familiar shape color and dimension to a recognizable subject a sunflower...and there in lies the question...because it resulted in a familiar subject in real life is it a "figurative" or an "abstract" image? You decide!
Here is how this image evolved.
I made a panoramic sequence of an abstract painting in the National Gallery of Art a couple weeks ago when I was conducting an iPhone workshop. Last night I selected one image out of the image sequence to run through Decim8 and "fracture." Fracture is what I feel like Decim8 does to an image.
One of the iterations resulted in an image which I used as a base to the final image.

Original source file

Image result from Decim8

Image run through TangledFX

Image flipped in Snapseed to put weight at the bottom of the image, and shift the diagonal lines. Then changed color in Color Thief from another image.
(I have never liked purples and pinks, but love the color vibration of blues and yellows.)

So there is the process I used to get to this image...so "Abstract" or "Figurative" does the manner in which the image is created change the label "Abstract" or "Figurative"?
Is it "Figurative" simply because our mind might identify a similar shape or color combination in the real world? You decide...thoughts and comments are welcome!

I still have a few spots open in my all day iPhone workshop on March 8 in Gaithersburg, Md.
Click here to register and for more info

Color Thief~

After my iPhone workshop on Sunday I took a quick spin through the West Wing of The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. There I found another bronze of Degas' Little 14 Year Old Dancer..one of my favorite bronze sculptures, another one resides at The Baltimore Museum of Art. I thought I would try the app Color Thief on the  image I made there of the sculpture.
My thought when I did was.....This app is pretty darn cool!
The opening image is a result of using the color shift app Color Thief. Color Thief launched in Dec 2012 and updated January 2013 to full res, awesome! It handled the color shift pretty well (you can still see remnants of the original color on the right side of the image but that did not bother me or discount the value of this app.) I love it for what it does. It's a one trick pony, robbing the color palette from one image and transferring it to another image.

Below is a screen shot of the open app which will give you an idea. The blue and gold abstract is the image I used to recolor the Little Dancer. 

The app is easy to use; First you find an image you want to use for the color "thievery" and then the image you want to recolor. So simple and cool! Then save your recolored image file. There are no sliders for opacity or blending Color Thief is just a single feature app, robbing colors!

 

And here is what the original file looked before I recolored it and after I had worked it using several apps blending images to create the background.

Apps: ImageBlender: Slow Shutter for background image: Glaze: Snapseed.

After walking through the west wing I went out on to the National Mall and made a few distant shots of the Capitol Building.

So I tried it on an image I had processed using several different apps adding some texture in Etchings and Retrolux in Snapseed, but you can see the color shift is pretty cool.  Join me in Baltimore on March 3 for a morning at The Baltimore Museum creating and processing iPhone images or spend a day learning in my next day long iPhone Processing workshop is March 8 in Gathersburg sponsored by Capital Photography Center. Hope to see you there!

Color Thief Screen shot

Original image tone