The art of nursing: the experience of patients and nurses.

Historical and contemporary conceptualizations of nursing have not addressed the art of nursing from an experiential research approach. This study explores patients' and nurses' experiences of the art of nursing using a phenomenological-hermeneutic approach to enquiry that allows for exploration of the empirical experience. Explicating a paradigm of the art of nursing, five distinct metathemes express nursing as art and describe the complex artistic processes that are lived through the nurse and patient.