This painting depicts a moment between two men, one human and the other selkie, who realize that they've found each other. Here, they meet not unlike Perseus and Andromeda.
The selkie of Northwestern European folklore, mainly the Gaelic-speaking lands and Iceland, is an interesting variation of the merpeople that I just had to add to my art projects.
Selkies are seals in the waves, but on land they have the ability to shed their cloaks and take human form. Often, there are tales of (often tragic) romance between a sealwoman and a human man, often because she is torn between her love for him and her love for her home, sea.
Less romantically, the human male will steal and hide her cloak so that she cannot return to the sea, effectively making her his prisoner, and therefore she stays with him for many years and bears several children by him. One day, the seal-woman's youngest child approaches her and tells her of a strange sealskin that has been hidden away in a trunk. From there, the human male never sees her again, although some stories feature the seal-woman returning to play with her children in the surf.
In Gaelic stories, specific terms for selkies are rarely used and are rarely differentiated from mermaids. They are most commonly referred to as maighdeann-mhara in Scottish Gaelic, maighdean mhara in Irish, and moidyn varrey in Manx ('maiden of the sea' i.e. "mermaid") and clearly have the seal-like attributes of selkies. The only term that specifically refers to a selkie but which is only rarely encountered is maighdeann-ròin, or 'seal maiden'.
One of my favorite songs related to the selkie is Mary McLaughlin's "Yundah/Sealwoman".
I can relate to selkies because, as a gay male, I can relate to feeling like I'm caught between two worlds, feeling like I don't exactly belong. Hans Christian Andersen apparently wrote The Little Mermaid as an allegory for his own experiences as a gay man in a society that shuns LGBTQIA+ people; like the mermaid ("Ariel", as we would call her now), he wants to be accepted as human and to live happily ever after with the man he loves. Given that he lived from 1805 to 1875, Andersen did not really get either, and a friend of his, Edvard Collin, even spurned him when he wrote a letter to him confessing that he loved him.
Since I have seen lately gender inversions of the romance, with a seal-man and a human woman in love, I wanted to show a romance between a seal-man and a human man. Why not a gay selkie romance at sunset? The natural world boasts many beautiful settings, and I very much had this atmosphere in mind.
The background I based on a segment of the Giant's Causeway (Clochán an Aifir) in Northern Ireland.
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