I don't claim to know exactly what abstraction is or that these are good abstractions (their purpose is illustrative and to be quick to produce). What I do know is that it is hard to move past my need to organize the world figurally and this affects how I see and interpret images.

There are probably many axes upon which to pursue the process of abstracting an image. The two that come to my mind are subjective (referring to the subject) and compositional.

Reducing the the subject toward a minimal representation of a flower is along the subjective axis. The viewer might ask "what is it a picture of?". How far along that axis one goes is a matter of "it depends".

Both images reorganize the flower with a pictorial consideration of the 'frame' formed by the image edges. Photographs tend to be 'full bleed' and not vignettes. In the original edit from the question, not acknowledging the implicit frame of the image might be what led someone to say 'it looks cropped'. The hard edges of a photograph impose orthogonal (usually horizontal and vertical) reference lines. All composition will play off of them whether the photographer wants it or not.

Advice:

1. Experiment.
2. Push the experiments past where you think the limit is.
3. Be OK with failing experiments.
4. Don't worry about what people think about you.