The Pet of the Hospital Nurses

Here is a piece I finished yesterday (I'm on a roll). It's entitled "The Pet of the Hospital Nurses" and is 11" x 11" (16" x 16" framed)...

I thought is might be interesting to show the evolution of the piece. It started with my interest in the "base" image, an etching from a book from the 1870s, which was entitled "The Pet of the Hospital Nurses".

I cut out the nurses and baby, and had experimented with various backgrounds...

I had intentions of extracting the baby's head from the image and replacing it with some kind of animal head. I realize that's a little bit "obvious" for the composition related to a teacher's "pet", or in this case, the nurses' pet; so I felt like I needed it to be compelling. As that idea "sat on the back burner". Then, I came across this etched image in another vintage book from the turn of the 20th century of a British politician named William Wilberforce. I found the pose in this portrait to be quite interesting. It looked a little "bratty" to me.. and weird (which, of course, was compelling to me... although I don't like using images of "famous" people, typically).

As I was cutting the body out of this image, I left a piece of the arm of the chair attached (mostly as a precaution to get the entire body of Wilberforce, and to not cut too much away... easier to cut more, than try to piece back together).

When I was experimenting with placement into the nurses image, I noticed that the arm of the chair was positioned so that it looked like some kind of weird prothetic arm of the nurse on the right. Okay!... another element of weirdness. Always welcome with me ;-) So I trimmed everything down, but left the arm of the chair attached.

I then had to look for an animal tail as another element. I got one from a contemporary wildlife book of a Senegalese galago. It seemed to work well. Then it was a matter of doing some more trimming (micro-cutting) and painting the edges of the individual elements, and placing them precisely together. I initially wanted to leave the title of the etching ("The Pet of the Hospital Nurses"), in tact, to be part of the composition. But I found it too "distracting" (or causing an imbalance).

I also had to decide whether to place the nurses arm in front of the border element, or behind (likewise for the bush on the bottom left). Once I decided, I proceeded with the border all the way around. I had to splice a number of these borders together and place them VERY precisely (so that the mat would be perfectly square to the borders. That process alone, took about two hours of careful splicing and placement. So, once again, here's the final composition: