Community : Mermaid artist to surface in town : Half Moon Bay Review, California
Home News Opinion Sports Talkabout Obituaries Community Classifieds Calendar Archives About Us Ad Rates

Mermaid artist to surface in town

Seascapes to host visiting Altadena artist

By Stacy Trevenon [ stacy@hmbreview.com ]
Published/Last Modified on Wednesday, Aug 26, 2009 - 09:30:41 am PDT

Seascapes, in Zaballa Square in Half Moon Bay, brings surf to turf with its gifts, seashells and other maritime items.

Those include greeting cards, magnets, prints or bookmarks with the appealing, softly hand-drawn mermaids by Altadena artist Karen Bagnard. The store has carried her work for 10 years — and on Sunday the artist herself will visit to show her fans how it is done.

“She’s got quite a following,” said Seascapes owner Sharon Foster. “She’s a really nice person who enjoys what she does and enjoys sharing what she does — and she’s going to be drawing for the people.”

Photo courtesy Sharon Foster Karen Bagnard shows some of her mermaid artwork.

Beginning at noon on Sunday, Aug. 30, Bagnard will sit down in Seascapes and create some of the variety of mermaids that are her trademark. Indian, Polynesian, pirate, pregnant and baby mermaids, and fairies and other fantastical beings, all emerge from Bagnard’s imagination and appear on paper, sketched in gentle lines and brightened with watercolor, then embellished with glitter.

“The ability to draw is a gift that brings great pleasure,” said Bagnard in a statement released by Foster. “The creative energy inside me brings great joy to my life.”

It all began as Bagnard was growing up devouring fairy tales from many cultures and absorbing the influences of Hans Christian Andersen and the flights of fancy of her sea-captain grandfather, Thorveld Petersen. As a girl, she enjoyed drawing the characters she imagined, particularly sea goddesses.

Through a professional background in advertising, marketing and human resources, her love of fantasy, magic and romance merged into elegant mermaids, fairies and other entities, created with delicate lines and splashes of color. In 1989 she embarked on a new career: creating her own card lines, one with one-of-a-kind handmade paper cards and the other with hand-embellished prints of her drawings.

Now the cards are sold nationally and internationally, along with a side business in magnets, stickers, prints and bookmarks bearing her art.

Seascapes is located in Zaballa Square, at 330 Main St., No. 105, in Half Moon Bay. It can be reached at 712-8096.

 

Want to talk about this story? Start a topic on Talkabout.

Reader Poll

Calendar

Upcoming Events:

Weather