stop the buff! i love all three of your paintings, you should not call them backgrounds! they are what they are, in themselves. 

for you the cat is already in the painting. it is your cat! as is the woman. if you want to reveal them to your audience, do it subtly, painting in just a few hints.

i immediately tried to put this to the test by blending only the red mouth of your woman into the abstract original. 

then i asked two of my friends to look at the image and tell me what they thought it represents.

the first one, an art therapist, said it made her think of Monet's waterlilies, and the red 'mouth' made her think of a boat....!  she told me that people generally need more cues if you want them to actually see something specific; for a face you would need to add some idea of a nose and two eyes, that always does the trick.

the second friend, a physiotherapist with no specific interest in or knowledge about art, also thought of water, a lake and some wild flowers, with a red fish swimming around....

so fascinating...! you will have to consider how much freedom you want to give your viewers to create their own stories. 

both of my friends found the 'translations' in the cat and the woman a lot less interesting and appealing than the abstracts. 

your new aqua-magenta painting is awesome, and needs nothing more. i have taken some time to consider the blue rectangle on the left, and i understand why you would want to change that, but i wouldn't tone it down. i like how it reflects the other 'windmill'-like shape in the middle and how the gradient kind of grounds it in the horizontal line you created. i think the main problem is that it feels a bit unbalanced because the shape is so big, it pulls the image (and your eye) to the left. 

i copied the image to my ipad and tried out different crops to correct this. here's my best proposal:

if you put a rule-of-thirds grid over the image, you can see that now the black figure is exactly on the right vertical line, reaching up to the top horizontal line, and the bottom of the blue rectangle is now smaller than that of the 'windmill' in the middle. i als like that the black figure seems to rise up from below the canvas, suggesting a world outside of the frame.

i love the upward curve of the different sized circles, from the bottom left towards the top right but not yet there, also leading my eye upwards and suggesting 'life'  beyond the top edge of the canvas.

about 'patterns' see in your work: the image above immediately reminded me of another one you posted a couple of days ago and you didn't (yet?) follow up on

see the connection? i love those dark vertical shapes! and love the color-palette as well, gorgeous!

this one in turn reminded me of one of my own images

apron strings