About Bask Clothing Co

The Story Behind Bask

I was six years old the first time I saw Achill Island. My family had made the journey west from Dublin on a long school break, and what greeted us was like nothing I had seen before: the sheer face of Minaun rising over Keel Bay, roads that seemed to narrow with each bend, and sheep, seemingly everywhere. It made an impression that never quite left me.

It would be another fifty years before I returned.

The reason I went back was a good one. I had married Ellen, the daughter of an Achill Islander, and the island that had lodged itself somewhere in my memory was now part of my family. Standing there again, I felt what I had felt as a child, that particular pull of a place that feels both ancient and alive. The light, the landscape, the crumbling stone of another era. Little had changed, and somehow that felt like a gift.

I began to paint. Oil on canvas of the cliff faces, the rugged bogs, the remnants of a way of life slowly being reclaimed by the land. And then came the sharks.

The basking shark is the gentle giant of the North Atlantic: vast, unhurried, and critically endangered. They arrive off the west coast of Ireland each season, filtering the surface waters in near-silence, and they are extraordinary. Once I started painting them, I couldn't stop. There was something in their quiet presence that demanded attention.

Bask Clothing Co grew from that obsession. I wanted to take the essence of these paintings, the ocean, the wildness of the west, and the unlikely grace of a basking shark and translate it into a clothing range that felt equally considered. Premium pieces, understated in design, worn by people who carry a quiet appreciation for the natural world.

Each season, a donation will go to organisations working to protect basking sharks in our oceans. It feels like the least I can do for a subject that has given me so much.

I'm adding to the range all the time, and soon you'll find reproduction prints and canvases of the basking shark paintings here too, for those who want to bring a piece of that Achill coastline home.

I hope you find something you love. And if you ever get the chance to visit Achill Island, I think you'll understand exactly what started all of this.

Conrad