I stumbled upon Harry Clarke. It was his grotesque illustration for Edgar Allan Poe’s Masque Of The Red Death, that caught my attention. My cohort Frank Fisicaro and I borrowed the image for some long sleeve shirts and a handful of prints for our black metal band, The Proprietor.

Harry Clarke was born on St. Patrick’s day in 1889, in Dublin. He studied art at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art and then worked for his father’s company, decorating churches, which then branched out to stained glass windows. He made over 130 windows in his short life. He was an accomplished illustrator, commissioned to commemorate to 49, 435 Irishmen who lost their lives fighting in World War I in Ireland’s memorial records. Harry made illustrations for work by Hans Christian Andersen, Goethe, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Alexander Pope, and the aforementioned Poe.

His work was steeped in Art Deco, and Art Nouveau, and his stained glass art took cues from the French Symbolist movement. While traveling to Switzerland for work, the artist who already had issues with his lungs contracted tuberculosis, and was admitted to a sanatarium in Davos. Before he could return home to Ireland, he passed on January 6th in 1931 and buried in Chur. Harry left behind a wife, Margaret (whom he married on Halloween in 1914) and three children, who were not aware of local law stating that the family must maintain the gravesite after fifteen years. Harry was disinterred in 1945 and reburied in a communal grave, which eerily resembles the plot in a Poe story. “Bury me in a nameless grave” echoes in my mind, some Aleister Crowley shit.

Throw back some Irish whiskey for Harry and listen to Prop.