An original acrylic painting of a red haired mermaid beneath the seas.I was inspired to paint her after reading about a

myth that a sailor wearing a gold earring couldn’t drown…around her neck she wears a long chain and at the end of this dangles some gold earrings… who knows if she helped them drown, mermaids were known to not be very nice after all.

Apparently, in olden times sailors never learnt to swim, so as not to prolong the horror of drowning should they fall…probably good logic but horrible nonetheless. In researching depictions of baddies, I came across a woodcut by Albrecht Durer of the devil, and in it he wears a similar crown to that which she wears. Even though it is a crown, it’s spiky and looks unkind.

The mermaid sits amongst some of her spoils, her skulls, a nautilus, some other shells, and in the background is a uruborus harp; she listens as tiny coloured fish glide up and down the strings making a terrible music. She looks sort of forlorn, but this just goes to show that things aren’t always what they seem. She’s a mermaid.