Delight in What Used to Bore Me

Book excerpt: 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.