The Mermaid Reinvented!

One question I get asked frequently about Luminous is why I chose to write about mermaids.  The answer is simple:  Mermaids capture the imagination.  And they’re just plain awesome!  But seriously, I’m not alone in my fascination with these beings surrounded in myth and magic.  Artists through the centuries have been enthralled by them, for example Lord Frederic Leighton and John William Waterhouse (I love Pre-Raphaelite art) and more recently Sheila Wolk, David Delamare and Victor Nizovtsev.  Poets and writers alike such as Alfred Lord Tennyson, Hans Christian Andersen and John Keats have kept the mermaid alive in our cultural mind.   Mermaids represent beauty to me.  They are the perfect union of human and nature, the tame and the wild.  They are pure freedom.  As a child, they made my imagination soar but as I grew into my teen years and beyond, I became frustrated with the limited way in which they were portrayed in our culture.  Most are familiar with the naiveté and innocence of Disney’s The Little Mermaid and the deadly beauty portrayed in the more recent, Pirates of the Caribbean:  On Stranger Tides as well as the shallow portrayal of the mermaids in Disney’s Peter Pan.  To me, these stereotypes were limiting and didn’t come close to how extraordinary I imagined mermaids to be.  The mermaid is one of the most persisting female archetypes through history and yet she hasn’t done any of the real women I’ve known in my life any justice at all.  Hence, my Psyne were born—mermaids reinvented!