Struggling with Ambiguity

I am really struggling with my painting at the moment in my efforts to explore figuration but to keep some sense of uncertainty and ambiguity.

 My problems are:

• I find it difficult to paint or draw something that does not actually look like what it is. The technique I  have evolved over the years is to work from the general to the specific - to work into detail. So now I am attempting to paint a figure and then to deconstruct it while the paint is still wet or to layer it over.
• Colour - I am working so fast that I am still getting carried away instead of planning and thinking. Having worked in pastel for so many years and now trying to work in paint, I am having to relearn mixing techniques while still remembering how to balance colours  and plan using a limited colour palette. I have started trying it experiment with the acrylic and I am getting some real disasters.
• Composition - my least worry. Working fast and experimenting wit colour means that my composition has pretty much gone by the board

See what you thing of this mixture of crisis and disaster. I was looking at some images of Pig Dyke Molly Morris dancers  taken from photographs I took at the Towersey Festival in 2010.  Mollys  are dancers who dress in women's clothes (presumably taken from the 18th century expression - Molly, meaning a gay transvestite prostitute) - in this case most of them actually are women with a  sort of post feminist take on Morris dancing (has to be seen to be believed). I like that way that Molly dancers challenge our view of sexuality and femininity.

I wanted to play with colour as a commentary on their exclusively black and white costumes.It worked OK with a limited blue/purple palette, but when I tried to experiment with red and green, the whole thing collapsed.

I have had a bit more luck with a portrait  of George Bernard Shaw, from an old photograph. A similar limited colour palette, but I seem to be getting somewhere.

Really I would like to be producing something like Frank Auerbach's portraits. He manages to express character through the actual quality of the paint and I am envious of his confidence in the use of colour. and strident brush or palette knife work, although I am trying to make my work a little more ambiguous.

I have managed something like this in a painting I did at life class the other day. The colour and composition still leave something to be desired, but I think I may be making progress: