Gabrielle Fitzpatrick’s Eulogy:
As I look around the room, I recognize more than a handful of people I’ve glared at from across a dinner table, because I thought I’d be having dinner with my father alone, and he brought 5 more people. I’ve always said that if he were a big cake, he’d want everyone in the world to have a slice. I was incredibly possessive of him. It is my hope that standing in this room with his 200 closest friends you can begin to understand why.
Anyway, I’ll start with a brief summary of the story we all know by now: from the time he could walk and talk my father was an absolute fucking menace. He was kicked out of more schools than you could count on both hands. He was yanked out of class by nuns on a weekly basis. There’s a little known story about him in the second grade, when he took his mom’s jewelry box to school and handed out a piece to every girl in his class. Then there’s the ones we know, about him drawing nuns with their tits out and eagles biting their heads off.
But when he wasn’t being scolded, he was being sweet. The Tony that many of us are lucky to know… he would bring home a new animal every week—a barn owl, an otter, a falcon, a snake, even a dying skunk (which inevitably lead to his mother Annamae having to bathe him in tomato juice).
He was a lover of all living things, a quality of his that, from afar, seemed to contradict his tough guy persona. But I think it was the toughest thing about him. His ability to see the beauty and the dignity in all living things. Being a kid that was always in trouble turned him into an adult that always had something to prove. I guess being seen as a bad kid can either be a self-fulfilling prophecy or a powerful source of motivation. In my father’s case, it was the latter.
When people would remark on his many ways of making a living—artist, actor, poet, boxer, bouncer, and so on, he’d often quip that he’d do anything to avoid honest work.
One of the tributes written to him last week described him as “guiltlessly commercial,” and rightly noted that even from the ICU he was still pedaling posters and holiday cards. “What’s the point,” the article’s author asked.
Perhaps some people may think that holiday cards, posters, tote bags, t-shirts, hell, even buttons, would be beneath an artist who’s work hangs in every important museum in the United States. You know who didn’t? My father, Tony Fitzpatrick. He never missed a chance to make himself available to any and all who wanted a slice of his world, and he loathed a missed marketing opportunity. But to that journalist’s question—what’s the point… the answer is bafflingly simple. It was not just a matter of making a living, but of survival.
He did those things because he was a working artist, and he had to. Not making work was never an option. My father spent every day of his adult life at his studio, except for Sundays. And at the end of his life he even stopped taking Sundays off. He needed to make sales, he needed make rent, to post bills, and yes, maybe post bail for his daughter every once in a while. In the last few years, if you watched him in his idle moments you could see him rubbing the inside of his palms… because they hurt. There was a time during COVID when we stood outside of his studio and he was leaned up against the building. With such defeat he took his face in his hands and he wept to me. He told me that it had been months since his last sale. He wondered if anyone cared about his work anymore. If it even mattered… Then he did something I’ll never forget. He went back into his studio, and he finished the drawing on his table. The next day it sold, along with two more.
Excuse me… let me just find my Tony Fitzpatrick handkerchief, available exclusively at Tonyfitzpatrick.com
I mention these hard times because they’re just as powerful as his victories. There were so many high points in his career where we felt he’d finally received the recognition that he deserved. Seeing him shine in the limelight was all the more sweet, all the more glorious, knowing just how hard he worked for it every single day. It felt like watching one of those orchids that bloom only one night a year, but for that one night they are the most beautiful thing on earth. But really, how often does a guy—one of 8 kids from a working-class irish-catholic family in Chicago—have his art hung on the same wall as a Picasso? Or get flown to Paris to shoot a TV show? Not bad for a guy trying to avoid honest work.
His talent, his charm, his wit… all of that got him through the door. But his persistence is what allowed him to stay there. Someone wrote on his shrine: “He showed us what’s possible when you show up.” Being a working artist is waking up every single day and betting on yourself, and if you ask me there’s nobody who did that better than my father.
If you take anything away from this poor excuse for a eulogy I’ve written, it should be this: bad kids don’t exist, please do feed the birds, and please lend your support to working artists. If you can’t buy their work, let them know that it matters. Show up for working artists, because it’s the only honest work that’s left.