Before I begin a long session of drawing, I make a pass at cleaning my office and getting things back into order. Not that it won’t be cluttered up again within a couple of hours, but it’s usually in a different way—so there’s a sense of progress.

As I don‘t try to take care of everything, this week I decided to concentrate on the area right around my computer and scanner. Amongst the various piles was a book on historic posters that I had pulled from my shelves in order to scan one or two for a new desktop background for my computer as I was getting tired of the one I’ve had for the past few months— a detail of a print by Kabutoyana. Though I am particular about my desktop picture, I can’t say it’s a huge priority as this book has been waiting to have its bookmarked pages to be scanned in for the past couple of weeks.

Same goes for my desktop background of my work computer. Whereas some of my co-workers have made an artform out of their frequently changing desktop pictures, I have had the same close up of this bird’s eye view map of Portland from 1890 for the past several months, maybe even a year. I feel so boring.

Actually, I’m kinda glad I hadn‘t changed it yet as someone from upstairs finally noticed what picture was on my desktop only a month ago. After I explained what it was, he sent me this great link to a website that features many pictures of old Portland.

But I definitely decided I needed a change at home, and so started scanning in posters. When I turned to this poster by Jan Troop from 1896:

I noticed that it was created for Het Hoogleland Beekbergen, identified as a psychiatric institute. Which isn‘t troublesome in itself, not even with madmen seeing angels. What disturbed me were all the cutting instruments in the poster. I did notice that there were some gardeners in the background and was willing to take them all as indicating that the inmates were kept occupied by working the land—if it weren’t for those forceps.

I took a little time to do a search on Het Hoogeland and found a few sites—all in Dutch. I‘ve mentioned earlier the trouble I have had with free, online translators that can handle Dutch–suffice to say much of it was garbled. But after running a page on Het Hoogeland through the translator, enough came through for me to determine that it was primarily a work farm for “beggars, vagrants and idiots” governed by Christian scripture. No surgery that I can find reference to.

But this wasn’t the poster I decided to use for my desktop. I chose one done by Kolomon Moser for a religious calendar in 1898 :

which I then cropped and manipulated so that it would fit properly within a monitor’s constraints:

This should hold me for a bit.