Clive Barker is up on Artsprojekt!! The consumate Hellraiser himself…

I used to be really obsessed with horror books and films, to the point where I literally memorized all the lines from A Nightmare on Elm Street after watching it over and over through a crack between my fingers. I saw Halloween, Children of the Corn, Christine, Friday the 13th, Texas Chainsaw, all of ‘em.

But it wasn’t until I read Kabal and saw Hellraiser that I realized what true horror was about. Clive Barker was dubbed the king of horror by Stephen King himself, and King even discounted the weight of his own work in the light of Barker’s eerie and horrific alter-realities.

Somehow Clive Barker’s work screwed with me big time. The characters in Kabal (which later became the hit film Nightbreed) were horrific, almost to the point where I didnt want to look straight at them in my mind’s eye, but through Barker’s humanizing of these underworld mutants I came to love them and fear them at the same time. Only one other book had that effect on me, and that was Geek Love, a novel by Katherine Dunn which chronicled a drug addict couple’s quest to create the ultimate freak show with their own offspring.

So, suffice it to say, I was honored and overjoyed when Clive Barker’s agent got in touch with us and told us Clive wanted to get up on Artsprojekt with his personal fine art and graphics. I already knew he was an excellent illustrator and painter, because I had seen some sketches in books and heard that he rendered all his characters by hand before and during writing his most famous works.

Welcome Clive! Thanks for sharing the Artsprojekt vision and, well, inspiring me and many others early on to push the limits of weirdness in our own work. You can see a character that reminds of his famous “Pinhead” character from the book and movie Hellraiser in this image…
-Andy Howell / Artsprojekt Founder