Sea Maiden 10 Joanne by Robert Kline

Sea Maiden 10 JoAnna – Maidenus Servitudo

Mermaid art and story by Robert Kline

This is a retired Sea Maiden print and is currently available for purchase in the following matted sizes: 5″ x 7″, 8″ x 10″  11″ x 14″ and an 11″ x 17″ that comes unmatted on a 1/4″ piece of foam board.

This wonderful mermaid art print and story are from a collection of Sea Maidens (mermaids), Sea Babies (mermaid babies), Sea Masters (merman), pirates, lighthouses and fairies created by renowned artist and novelist Robert Kline of St. Augustine, Florida.  The print is a lithograph reproduction of Robert’s original watercolor and pencil painting. Hand labeled and signed by Robert in pencil, all the prints come with a 1/4″ foam backing and the 5″ x 7″, 8″ x 10″, 11″ x 14″ are matted so all you need is a frame and they are ready to hang on your wall! Each print also comes with an excerpt from Robert’s novel The Forgotten Voyage of H.M.S. Baci. A fantastic saga in which multiple generations of the Roberts’ family explore the seven seas in search of the world’s mermaid and merman population. Thus, you receive the passage from Robert’s novel describing the particular event in which the character(s) in the print were sighted. The following is the excerpt written for the Sea Maiden 10 Joanna print:

The HMS Baci beat out of St. Augustine harbor and into the Atlantic Sea one year to the day of  leaving England for the naturalist’s circumnavigation. But this time the ship befell an unnatural clam soon after striking land. She rolled for days on oily swells, her masts lost in fog. A consequent oppression gripped those who served before the mast. It had been a queer voyage thus far with a spate of deaths and desertions and while the captain’s metal collapse was unsettling, his later reduction to a sort of Shepard’s pie by the Baci’s own cannon fire was too much. The crews quilt lay heavy and with each day becalmed they were more convinced his ghost was now charting their cruise to hell.

He stumped across the quarter deck nightly (his leg lost by consensus). He mumbled curses from the ship’s bowels and his malodorous presence lurked in every shadow. He followed into the rigging, jogging handholds and greasing spars. He whispered their names in deepest sleep.

They would have deserted to the man had it not been for their new captain, the ghosts widow. Her beauty was as soft as a puppy’s underbelly and she carried it with regal abandon. And so the crew remained, jumping at every sound and anxious to get under weigh again and once more try to outrun the curse.

Sir Edmund Roberts, the ship’s chartered and Sea Maiden questor was not similarly affected; he became increasingly hermetic, spending his days reviewing his notebooks and his evenings sketching the current captain, Constance Daphne Fitzwille, an activity to which she feigned ignorance. Sir Edmund, as taken by her beauty as the others, shared a common cabin wall with her, a wall which succumbed to a well augured hole above her mirror.

So as the crew wrung its hands and whistled for wind, Sir Edmund expanded his notebooks and completed increasingly captivating watercolor portraits of his amour. His Sea Maiden discoveries and theories are the definitive text:

A year abroad and we have befallen 10 Sea Maidens, each unique and equally captivating. I have learned much both by observation and by interviews with those of the crew who have additional knowledge. Unfortunately, a vast store of such information is Gnarly Dan, the most annoying of the lot. He spits tobacco at each pause and pontificates endlessly; I long to throttle him. I have learned; while Sea Maidens are often solitaire, particularly on land (post aqua) they do migrate and do so in great numbers – at least they did when there were great numbers of them, for they are in decline; their environment increasingly spoiled by man’s carelessness. Vast sluices of whale blood and uncounted rafts of flotsam and jetsam have begun to render our delicate oceans poisonous.

So their numbers decrease – though they still migrate in groups. Such groups are called pools – some where between whale pods and fish schools. These pools travel to the waters of either pole, a matter to investigate, and as they do so they increase their body fat. Thus, a lithe maiden in equatorial climes will be corpulent as she frolics with penguins on ice island.

While becalmed I have taken to employing my diving bell. I have seen but one Sea Maiden, she passing hourly beneath the bell’s open bottom, face upward, her arms crossed above her head and locked at the wrists in what (who else!) Gnarly Dan refers to as the classic Sea Maiden manner of transmitting her stature as unencumbered by love but ready to accept its servitude. Says he: “A Sea Maiden loses herself to love as easily as she slips into the sea, for she does both willingly and without regret.

Maidenous Servitudo
“Joanna”
December 30, 1832
Off northern coast of Florida
Long, thin and beautiful. Curled blond hair.