A tattooed panther dances above the words “the lucky kind” on Tony Fitzpatrick’s beefy left arm. When asked to explain his many accomplishments–as high-priced artist, radio personality, award-winning actor, published poet–Fitzpatrick rolls up his T-shirt sleeve, smiles and taps his tattoo.
“I’ve been extremely lucky,” he says while laboring over a sea monster etching. “Luck is underrated, believe me. Because if you don’t have it, you’re screwed.”
Those who know Fitzpatrick say that in his case, luck isn’t everything. Talent and tenacity also have transformed him from a guy who couldn’t hold a job as a janitor into a self-taught artist whose works hang in the Art Institute of Chicago and New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Big-name movie directors like Jonathan Demme (“Philadelphia”) and Stephen Frears (“Hero”) give him bit parts in their movies. Famous musicians–from the Neville Brothers to Lou Reed–want his art on their album covers. Last fall, WLUP radio basically handed him an evening show to co-host, a position he resigned in February.
Yes, he believes in luck. But that doesn’t mean that Fitzpatrick, 36, a big, balding guy with a wrong-side-of-the-tracks aura, would deny he deserves his success.
“Tony’s got an ego the size of the Grand Canyon,” says WLUP radio personality Buzz Kilman, a close friend and patron. Fitzpatrick freely owns up to his big ego. After all, it kept him going when nobody would even look at, let alone buy, the painted chalk boards he once toted around in a knapsack. Ultimately, those same little slates–which he no longer produces–would become hot, hot, hot with art collectors and Hollywood types.
Still, his ego has proven “crippling” at times, luring him into undertakings that don’t always work out.
Big Cat Press, Fitzpatrick’s Bucktown studio and printmaking shop, reveals much about the man who works there. Books on a library’s worth of subjects fill the front section of this spacious storefront at 2124 N. Damen Ave. There are volumes on birds, insects, sea legends, boxing, baseball, poetry, movies, great literature and tattoos, among others.
“I’ve always found that it’s good in this life to do a few things,” Fitzpatrick says. “If you have curiosities, you should indulge them. I find the more stuff I do, the more stuff I have to make art about.” If those curiosities involve the right brain, the creative side of the mind, Fitzpatrick is willing to dabble. For example, he plans to write a children’s book based on his “Dime Circus” etchings, which celebrate the honky-tonk world of the big top. (The colorful new series is exhibited with other recent works at the Edward R. Varndell gallery, 2153 W. North Ave.)
Fitzpatrick also is writing his first play. The subject: “The world’s last disc jockey rants at a dying world.”
But excursions into left-brain territory, where logic and numbers rule, have proven treacherous for a man who developed his artistic style from comic books, horror magazines and tattoo art.
“There’s a ton of stuff I can’t do,” Fitzpatrick says. “I can’t balance a checkbook, I can’t read instructions. I can’t program a VCR.” Almost bragging, Fitzpatrick tells a neighboring artist who stops for a visit that he’s great at earning and spending money, but lousy at saving it. “Can you believe, I just paid 30 bucks for a (dead) bug?” he says, laughing about a recent shopping excursion to a neighborhood florist.
His most public left-brain failure, however, was the two-time shuttering of his World Tattoo Gallery at 13th Street and Wabash Avenue. Five years ago, Fitzpatrick launched the art gallery as a showplace for the city’s untrained “outsider” artists and emerging talents, who were excluded from what Fitzpatrick calls Chicago’s “clannish, paranoid, elite” mainstream gallery scene. That same scene virtually ignored him when he tried to break in more than ten years ago, he says.
“I don’t mind a guy looking at (my work) and saying, `It’s not for me.’ Hey, it’s America. But they wouldn’t even take a look.”
Fitzpatrick’s disgust is palpable when he discusses the galleries, which traditionally take up to 50 percent of the sale price of every work. “Fewer than five or six people–and I don’t want to name ’em, because I don’t want to give them that credit–control the (galleries) here,”he says. “There’s only one principal art critic here, (the Chicago Tribune’s) Alan Artner. And to be fair to him, a lot of dealers have tried to muzzle him. In New York, there’s about 50 or 60 people writing criticism and 300 to 400 art galleries.
The New York galleries, Fitzpatrick says, “buy ads. They invest in the careers of the artists. They publish catalogs. There’s a whole thriving economy based on art. I can’t remember the last time I saw (a Chicago dealer) publish a catalog. I feel like they collect their 50 percent and that’s it. . . . What’s being done for artists here, they could do for themselves.” Yet many local artists are “too timid, too tentative” to stand up for themselves, he says. “And a lot of them have a large sense of entitlement. Instead of banding together and doing things for themselves, they wait for (expletive) things like grants.”
But the “greatest sin” perpetrated by dealers and artists “is that we’ve cut Joe Lunch Box out of (the art world), by not being accessible,” Fitzpatrick says. “People have told me that they’re intimidated to go into galleries. And when they do get up the nerve to go in, there’s some diffident, $7-an-hour (expletive) sitting behind the desk, who doesn’t feel like saying `Hello’ or `Can I tell you about (these paintings)?’ “
David Russick, the assistant director of the Phyllis Kind Gallery in Chicago and a painter himself, understands Fitzpatrick’s frustration and anger. After all, unless they are “wildly successful,” most artists have a tough time earning a fair living.
“But I think he’s chosen the wrong enemy,” says Russick, who believes that the public, which undervalues art and artists, is more likely the problem. “A number of dealers have sold a lot of Tony’s work. In that sense I feel he’s been harsh and a little unfair.”
World Tattoo closed in January 1994, but Fitzpatrick reopened it last fall with a show of works by himself and Chicago artists Ed Paschke and Wesley Kimler. This time he hoped to break the mainstream gallery system. He envisioned a place where artists would receive direct payment for their work and, in turn, pay a comparatively small 15 to 20 percent commission to a gallery manager. But World Tattoo shut down again in January.
Fitzpatrick blames his lack of business acumen–and an ego that wouldn’t allow him to accept this shortcoming–for his two-time failure.
“Putting a gallery out of business twice in one year is a dubious record. Both times it closed because I’m a (expletive) businessman,” says Fitzpatrick, who liberally peppers his conversations with comedian George Carlin’s “seven words you can’t say on television.”
Fitzpatrick’s wife, Michele, World Tattoo’s first director, says her husband was “atrocious” at running an art gallery, approaching the task from an artist’s rather than a businessman’s perspective. “But the worst thing about it was that he didn’t admit he was a bad businessman until World Tattoo closed” the first time, she says.
Fitzpatrick was either naive or indifferent about things such as operating costs and debt. And his heart often overruled his head. “He would have six people sweeping floors, because they were kids who needed the money, or six people sitting at the desk doing nothing because he wanted to help them out,” says Michele. “Once I walked in and there was this woman sweeping the floor. I asked who she was, and they told me she had come in and asked Tony for a job. When he told her he couldn’t give her one, she started crying. Next thing we knew, she was on the payroll.”
The second time around, the World Tattoo collapsed because Fitzpatrick hired a gallery manager on a handshake and little else. The manager promised $50,000 in financial backing, including $16,000 in rent money. Fitzpatrick learned the man had no assets when the rent check bounced, and the landlord evicted the gallery from its space. Having spent his profits from the opening show on printmaking equipment for his new Bucktown facility, Fitzpatrick had no money to keep the gallery going.
“This guy unfortunately had a problem with telling the truth,” Fitzpatrick says of the manager. “The long and short of it is that I should have seen him coming. When someone promises you something that’s too good to be true, it usually is. I got duped.”
Although World Tattoo’s closing was a major personal disappointment, Fitzpatrick believes it made the Chicago art world extremely happy. “I could hear (the dealers) dancing on my grave when we went out of business again,” he says, taking a drag on a Merit Ultra Light. However, Russick says gallery operators didn’t have a “death wish” for World Tattoo. Yes, there may have been some competitive jealousy, but little more.
“If anybody was hoping they would fail,” says Russick, “it would have been on the level of two neighbors planting gardens next to each other and one having nicer-looking roses.” In retrospect, Fitzpatrick says he should have ignored his ego and kept World Tattoo closed the first time around. Although he has thought briefly about trying once more, he quickly changed his mind. “What I should be focusing on is making art and taking care of my wife and two kids.
“Things have been done to save me from myself,” he says. Without looking up from his work, Fitzpatrick yells to Theresa Schommer, his master printer. “Hey Theresa, what are you supposed to do if I ever try to open another art gallery?” “Shoot you in the head,” she yells back.
Fitzpatrick says his art work, in part, is a means of determining and defining his beliefs. Bursting with tiny tattoo-colored images that range from funny to frightening, his pieces give the impression that self-discovery is a complex process. In “Norwhalis,” one of his sea monster etchings, Fitzpatrick crams every space around his praying green beast with an eclectic mix of cartoonish drawings. There’s Max, Fitzpatrick’s 3-year-old son, standing aboard a ship wearing boxing gloves. A compass, clock and Indian head coin also appear in the four-color etching. A peacock rules one corner, while a bumblebee woman flies over another. Radio waves squiggle between images. And that’s not all.
“This one has an apocalyptic feel to it. It looks like the last of something, which is spooky,” says Fitzpatrick, who describes his works as “little narratives.” Sometimes he easily explains the story. A skull that appears in another sea creature etching represents radio listeners “who want to tell you nasty things, but not to your face.” Other times he fumbles for an explanation. Clearly growing exasperated with a visitor who keeps pressing for specifics, Fitzpatrick settles on this: “The guy who makes the picture, he’s the one who knows the story. Hopefully, (my work is) about all of the good in the bad and all of the bad in the good, rendered without judgment.”
Featuring “the good” as well as “the bad” is a relatively new concept for Fitzpatrick. His earlier work, much of it done in colored pencil and paint on small chalk boards, often featured a grotesque world populated with freaks, whores, transvestites, murderers and other fringe elements. To some, Fitzpatrick is best known as the guy who produced a 1988 portrait series on mass murderers, which featured John Wayne Gacy in spider-covered bikini underwear.
(The series inspired a play by Chicago’s Prop Theatre. Fitzpatrick both scripted and portrayed the character of mass murderer James Huberty and won a Jefferson Award for his performance.) Fitzpatrick followed the mass murderer portraits with a more upbeat series on American heroes, including Harry Houdini, Joe Louis and Nelson Algren. But his real artistic turning point came, he says, when he watched Michele give birth to Max. (The couple’s second child, Gabrielle, was born last November.)
