Donna Frost

Introduction 25 1 from that of their colleagues. Moreover, as Titchen ( 2009 ) and Austen ( 2010 ) explain, professional artistry can be invisible to the very practitioners who demonstrate it in practice, even when those practitioners are explicitly engaged in developing their professional expertise. Two small bodies of work have made particular contributions to explicating and endeavouring to understand professional artistry. Within the first of these the artistry of professional practice is linked to the Arts (Fish, 1998 ), in terms of both artistic practice or performance and aesthetic appreciation or connoisseurship. Through the artistic expression and appreciation of those ideas, knowledge, thoughts and feelings usually regarded as tacit or even ineffable, professionals are helped to communicate about, appreciate and consciously develop their artistry, enabling wisdom in their decision making and practice (Fish & Coles, 1998 ; Beeston & Higgs, 2001 ; Fish & de Cossart, 2007 ). Fish ( 1991 , 2004 ) emphasizes the need to pay attention to both technical and professional artistry views of professionalism when considering how to assure quality within professional practice and clinical judgement. This work has been influential with respect to the development of resources, for example, to support professionals such as new doctors in learning decision making practices which will enable wisdom (Fish & Coles, 1998 ; Fish & de Cossart, 2006 , 2007 ). De Cossart and Fish ( 2004 ) see professional artistry as necessary for wise judgement and as complimentary to scientific knowledge. They emphasize the importance of bringing tacit processes into cognitive awareness to help professionals learn to exercise judgement in the midst of messy practice situations (Fish, 2004 ). In the second body of work around professional artistry, performance, connoisseurship and wise judgement are also discussed, as parts of a wider story. Professional artistry emerged as one of three key findings from Titchen’s ( 1998 ) research into professional craft knowledge and its facilitation. Professional artistry was found to be: ... key to patient-centred nursing and to being an effective facilitator of learning. This artistry is discerned in a subtle balance and interplay between intuition and rational thinking and an interpretive and associative use of professional craft knowledge’ (Titchen, 2000 , p. 3 ). Titchen argues that this finding challenges both the idea of expertise being exemplified by the use of intuitive judgement, and that research findings and theoretical principles are merely applied to practice by nurses. Her understandings