Designing album covers for rock stars, having your work displayed at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and creating one of the most recognisable political posters of the 20th century is a dream career for any artist.
For a kid from Glasnevin with no art degree or even art classes in school, this was reality.
For over 60 years, Jim Fitzpatrick has quietly been shaping the landscape of Irish art. His work draws on Irish Celtic illustration and is influenced by earlier comic design. This versatility has allowed his work to translate across a range of different mediums, from posters and album covers to paintings.
Fitzpatrick had an artistic upbringing in Dublin. He often painted and drew as a child. His father, as he puts it, was a mediocre artist but an excellent photographer. When his father abandoned the family when Fitzpatrick was five years old, his mother relocated the family to Glasnevin.
He was encouraged by his teachers and priests at school to draw and paint on his own time. “I didn’t have art lessons or classes, they were unheard of in those days, but teachers and priests encouraged my curiosity by giving me books about art,” said Fitzpatrick.
His head swiftly turned from his Leaving Cert in his final year to his passion for design when he got a job at the Irish Times.
“I was doing my Leaving, and I got a job in advertising at the Irish Times for £2 a week and decided quickly that I couldn’t be arsed with the Leaving anymore,” said Fitzpatrick
This acted as the foundation of his career as he began to develop his creative skills in a booming industry, but something called Fitzpatrick down another path.
“I loved every minute of advertising, and I earned an absolute fortune, but I gave it all up to be an artist,” said Fitzpatrick.
As he put it, the ‘Poster Boom’ of the 1960s was his encouragement to go headfirst into his dream of becoming an artist. Working closely with his football teammate, Eamon Carr, founder of the band Horslips, he began to create posters as his main form of work.
It was through this very football team that Fitzpatrick would later be introduced to a new teammate and key figure in his career, Phil Lynott.
As lead singer of one of Ireland’s biggest rock bands, Thin Lizzy, Lynott didn’t really have much time to design album covers, so he entrusted Fitzpatrick with this job. The pair met through their mutual football teammate Frank Murray, manager of The Pogues, and instantly hit it off.
They shared similar interests in comics and art, but Fitzpatrick credits their shared experience of having an absent father in childhood as something that brought them closer to one another.
Sharing this experience meant “we blended into each other and became close quickly in a way in which he could nearly read my mind about anything creative,” said Fitzpatrick.
The creative process behind an album design was quite elaborate. He lived in Dublin and Lynott in London, so creative discussions took place via landline. The pair would discuss elements of the design, and he would send a first draft by courier to travel by, as he put it, “a randomer’s arse pocket”, to be at Lynott’s door the next morning. This would continue until the design was finalised.
Fitzpatrick went on to design multiple iconic album covers for Thin Lizzy, such as Jailbreak, Chinatown, Johnny the Fox, and Black Rose. An original sketch of the Black Rose has recently featured in The Music is Black: A British Story exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Fitzpatrick, a proud Irishman, took to his website to state, “They wanted Thin Lizzy in this exhibition and rightly so. Philip Lynott was a Black Irishman, and Thin Lizzy were based in England and part of the British music scene, whether we like it or not. Much as we love to claim them as Irish, in those days you had to leave this country to get anywhere.”
Although a great achievement for any artist, this wasn’t Fitzpatrick’s first piece of work to hang in the museum. His most iconic and important work, the Che Guevara Poster, was featured in this museum in 2006.
This iconic, stark two-toned portrait poster of Che Guevara protruding from a red and black background was designed by Fitzpatrick in 1968 based on a photo by Alberto Korda taken in 1960.
The poster went viral around the world and is recognised by Pulitzer as the most reproduced image in the history of photography. Although the image was created by Fitzpatrick, he never chose to copyright it and has allowed people to download it for free to this day.
As chance would have it, Fitzpatrick and Guevara’s paths crossed in 1961 in a pub in Kilkee. “I was working behind the bar, and this fellow in a trench coat came into the pub. It ended up being Che, and we had a long talk about Irish Republicanism and freedom fighters,” said Fitzpatrick.
There has been a lot of confusion and controversy around the credits of the image. Later in his career, Fitzpatrick would begin to credit Korda for the photograph titled Guerrillero Heroico, which he used in the poster. Fitzpatrick stated that, before Korda died in 2001, he said to him that the poster made his photograph famous.
His career is far from slowing down, as he is currently working on a project with Irish rap group Kneecap and has recently had his work featured in the Lost Love of Romeo exhibition in Studio 10 on Wicklow Street.
For a career that took many different turns, from designing album covers, political posters, and Celtic psychedelic paintings, Fitzpatrick’s work is still deeply influenced by his unpredictability, curiosity and unapologetic Irishness.
Academic integrity.
To write this article, I contacted Jim Fitzpatrick through email, phone number, WhatsApp and Instagram DM. I eventually got hold of him through Instagram and was able to set up an interview to be done over the phone. This led to a 45 minute in depth interview, which I was able to base the whole article around. All photos used in the article are credited to Jim
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