Evolving Artist, Evolving Art
by SANDRA BROWN KELLY

A youthful Eric Fitzpatrick can be found among the crowd in a decades-old painting of the revered Brambleton Avenue nightspot, The Coffee Pot. He painted the scene and then sold prints from it as he has done with other well-known and well-worn Roanoke locales.

Art like that of the Coffee Pot “was a younger man’s take on the world...a pop art look,” Fitzpatrick said recently during a tour of his work in the galleries at his South Roanoke home.

The pop-art Eric has given way to a more introspective artist whose recent work makes a statement on some of the best and some of the not-so-good points of Southern culture while other pieces capture the joy of blues musicians and still others the soul of the artist.

“As a person grows older and grows up, life experience grows deeper,” Eric said. “My father’s passing made me look inside and do things I didn’t know I had in me.”

His father, Judge Beverly Fitzpatrick, died in 2000. Judge Fitzpatrick had been a legal and community leader who led the movement to renovate the former Jefferson High School into The Jefferson Center. Eric’s sculpture of his father is on display at the center.

In early December, Eric took a sculpture workshop in Staunton with a master sculptor with whom he has studied painting for the past two years in Maine.

The workshop was on portrait sculpture. His first such effort had been the bronze of his father.

Midlife thoughts sent Eric back to see just what he can do in the fine arts, he said. He began as a sculptor when an art student at Virginia Tech and has resumed it with vigor, at the same time increasing his work in oils and expanding in watercolors.

The Maine coast and the Outer Banks have been recent subject areas for Eric. He sketched and then painted 20 oils of Outer Banks scenes just before Thanksgiving.

At the same time he pursues his art with perhaps more energy and passion than ever, he deigns to place it as the be-all of life, saying he has come to the realization that the “big picture of life” may not be art.

But his works indicate he may find that “big picture” through art. Among recent works from his inward-looking stage is “Apologia,” in which a minotaur is the central character. It was painted after a particularly painful period upon the breakup of a long-time relationship.

The experience in that relationship also sent him on a quest to contact former girlfriends and to apologize to them for any time he had been unkind.

The minotaur represented the arrogance people can demonstrate in a relationship, he said.

Still a bachelor at 50, Eric confesses to having more insight because of “the wonderful ladies who moved in — and out - of my life and broke my heart - and me, theirs.”

Just as he was urged to apologize to former girlfriends, Eric said he has a new urgency about his painting. He wants to see just what he can do.

In February, he will begin his second consecutive fellowship at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Amherst County, near Sweetbriar College.

The last time he was at VCCA, he was in the company of poets from the West Coast, a painter from Vancouver, a composer writing a Mass for National Cathedral, a playwright from New York writing about her Italian grandmother in the resistance in World War II, a filmmaker doing a documentary on her father’s Nazi upbringing in Austria, and a professor from South Carolina writing a biography of a slave turned military hero in the Civil War.

“The atmosphere was the richest I’ve been a part of, and it started a new series for me, ‘The Southern Culture Series’ dealing with the way Southerners are raised, the way the Civil War has been packaged for us and all things of the Southern experience,” Eric said.

The Southern Culture works include a painting of a funeral in a black church Eric attended last while at VCCA.

“They were amazingly honest and expressive of their grief. I really admired them, and the celebratory nature of their services,” Eric said.

He has done other funeral scenes, too, and even included himself and his mother, Helen Fitzpatrick, in the congregation of one.

It is as though he has replaced the pop art of youth with art that bares the heart in a grown-up pop-art way, if there is such a thing.

Witness a self-portrait, “The Jester.”

“I think only at this age can we begin to see ourselves objectively in everyday situations. The painting depicts that feeling of silliness in an awkward situation that you later have to laugh about. In this case, I was having dinner with a beautiful Italian playwright from New York and found myself acting like an awkward schoolboy around her. There I was trying very hard to appear witty and intelligent, and appearing to be neither! Thank God that we can honestly see ourselves at such moments and find humor in it!”

Age - maturity - definitely has not dulled the irrepressible sense of humor Eric has often shared with family and friends.

Evidence of foolery has been sprinkled throughout his home and studio. Christmas ornaments hang from a stuffed deer head on the studio wall. His favorite stuffed chair saw its better days so long ago that it has become its own work of art.

In the kitchen, which rarely gets used for food preparation - he eats out or heats a can of soup - hangs a gigantic can of neon sardines. Exterior windows are covered with murals as is the living room mantel. Eric says the unclad women gracing the mantel are not from real life. Well, maybe not.

At the same time he is creating art for sale and art on the mantel, he has remodeled his studio to lessen the clutter and bring in more light. He even convinced a neighbor to let him cut down the neighbor’s tree to open the studio windows to even more light.

A huge wall calendar tracks progress of his artworks. Files contain clippings of faces or landscapes he might want to view some day for creating a scene. Everything is orderly, even on the framing side of the studio.

Even light switches are labeled as to what lights they turn on, a concession, Eric says, to his lifelong dyslexia.

The studio, built many years ago to the rear of his house of Richelieu Avenue Southwest, looks out on an authentic Italian garden Eric created after spending several years studying in Italy.

At the back of this formal garden, however, he has left sufficient evidence that the midlife that made him more serious also can be playful. He has mounted a fireplace complete with andirons onto the inside of the fence gate and created a miniature living room complete with a ceiling. This area is the “garage” for his motorcycle.

If he wishes, Eric can hop on the cycle, unlatch the gate, swing out the fireplace and ride into the alley and on out to the street.

It’s like a magical thing, more of what Eric was expressing when he painted the self-portrait, “The Wizard.”

“The Wizard” captures “the thrill of painting,” he said. “It is an indescribable thrill when you turn a blank piece of canvas into something fascinating. It is nothing less than alchemy!

“Now I know that this talent is God-given, and I take no credit for it, but I have worked very hard at learning to harness it. And it is certainly a thrill when you channel something larger than yourself and let it come racing through you and out onto the waiting canvas.” http://www.fitzpatrick-art.com