Painting prolifically for nearly three decades, artist Christopher St. Leger has created a luminescent body of work that exhibits an artist's evolving mastery of light and mood. The resulting collection is a journey through places that somehow exist in both familiarity and ambiguity.Warm watercolor and oil vignettes that extract wonder from the mundane; that summon majesty from the ordinary. Beautiful moments that reveal the tension in the ostensibly serene; that miraculously invoke the ephemeral to stand still. St. Leger's work also displays an artist's thoughtful command of craft and persistent preoccupation with dimension and place. Each image is a study of technical dimensions - the measurable extent of how something is defined in relation to physical space, but also existential dimensions - the unspoken depth of the moment at hand. And each image is a philosophical survey of place - a personal voyage through the everyday places that exist around us, but also a deeply personal journey seeking to understand his own place in the world. More so, by surveying St. Leger's entirety of work, we come to understand how joyful and essential he has deemed the act of painting. We discover a self-taught artist deeply loyal to his creative calling and stringently dedicated to practicing his craft. Highlighted in the following pages is the result of that dedication. A collection that not only reveals St. Leger's impressive creative and technical evolutions, but also his subtle internal evolutions that resonate deeply with those who engage with his work.

Under ?Erotic Symbolism? I include practically all the aberrations of the sexual instinct, although some of these have seemed of sufficient importance for separate discussion in previous volumes. It is highly probable that many readers will consider that the name scarcely suffices to cover manifestations so numerous and so varied. The term ?sexual equivalents? will seem preferable to some. ?The Mechanism of Detumescence? brings us at last to the final climax for which the earlier and more prolonged stage of tumescence, which has occupied us so often in these Studies, is the elaborate preliminary. ?The art of love,? a clever woman novelist has written, ?is the art of preparation.? That ?preparation? is, on the physiological side, the production of tumescence, and all courtship is concerned in building up tumescence. But the final conjugation of two individuals in an explosion of detumescence, thus slowly brought about, though it is largely an involuntary act, is still not without its psychological implications and consequences;In the Psychic State of Pregnancy we at last touch the point at which the whole complex process of sex reaches its goal. A woman with a child in her womb is the everlasting miracle which all the romance of love, all the cunning devices of tumescence and detumescence, have been invented to make manifest.

Drawing on a broad range of historical and sociological literature, this book traces the everyday gambling experiences of a diverse group of women. It provides fascinating and original insights into the pleasures afforded to women through their gambling participation and draws on a variety of feminist literature to understand women's motivations and experience of play, and to examine the ways in which women negotiate their right to gamble without reprimand. Since gambling tends to be framed within moral discourses of danger and excess, this book offers a defence of women's decisions to gamble against an often hostile backdrop. It rewrites claims that gambling is 'meaningless' and reckless spending, by pointing instead to the highly complex strategies that women who gamble employ. Importantly, it adds to contemporary feminist debates about women's leisure by showing how women seize control of their lives in order to carve out a time and space for the pursuit of pleasure.