As a still life painter, I wanted to create something more abstract than my usual style, but still within the realms of nature. I thought about the plethora of amazing patterns that appear naturally and decided to use coral polyps as inspiration. I composed a colour palette that was decidedly different to the colours in nature, to push the sense of abstraction and create a dramatic composition. The result had a distinct look of an agate cross section, which I thought was a happy accident, being another wonderful natural pattern.