pastel painting exercises - limited palette

Well despite all my good intentions, it has been eleven days since my last post. I have been doing a series of limited palette pastel paintings, exercises from a book I recently aquired. I have enjoyed doing them and feel that the resulting paintings are good enough to be exhibited in my art group's next exhibition. This will be in October, so I am looking well ahead. Here are a couple of the paintings, as usual larger siuze images can be seen on my Flickr photostream.

They are in what I would term my style of "painting". Very impressionistic and tend to lack any real details. Lots of texture which helps to offset this.

I was listening to a program on the BBC this morning about "The Scream" by E. Munch, the discussion told how he was very impressed by Van Gogh and often quoted from him. "A painting should not have to be an actual representation of a real life image, but should show what the artist was feeling". I have paraphrased the quote, a lot has happened today and I am not sure what the exact words were but it is exactly how I feel when painting. After all, what is the camera for?

One other piece I would like to show here is a present I created for my MIL ( Dublin born and bred and now 98 years old) - St Patrick's Day was yesterday after all:

The base is a 4 X 6 inch stretched canvas. I have painted around the edge with a metallic, copper acrylic before layering with a base card. The images are from a collage sheet by Kim Newberg and I have finished it off by using ribbons, faux gems and a silk rose. I think she liked it.

Ok that's it for now. Lots to do before retiring tonight and an early start tomorrow..........