I've admired Rowena since long before I collected art, when I bought her
J. R. R. Tolkien Calendars every year they ran. We are also friends, so it is surprising that it took me so long to get one of her originals.
This was sold to me a pencil preliminary for the painting which appears below and is published as a two-page (pages 32-33) spread in The Art of Rowena. It is entitled "The Mermaid's Tale". Her commentary in the book is a follows:
"Her tail is very long. It recedes into the background, wraps around itself and coils into the foreground again. It is not immediately apparent that the tail ends in the monster's head. He is actually part of the Mermaid. She is hugging and caressing him, and clearly loves him. I had two points at issue when I conceived this. The first was to create a depiction of narcissism. The second was to make a statement about the vast contradictions about the vast contradictions that can exist within the same human being. In a somewhat narcissistic, the mermaid is embracing the wild side of her nature."
The book also has another pencil version of the same idea in the Forward, shown below. This indicates to me that she did several versions of this before settling on the painting and that mine is just one of those.
