WHAT ONE MAN DID WITH EVERY BIT OF PAPER HE EVER SAVED
By Brigitte S. King
Special to Inside
A recent evening stroll along the 4700 block of N. Lincoln Ave. yielded bright lights, choice shopping, and a surprisingly rich cultural life. On the long mall that includes Giddings Plaza, where you can always find a sweet pastry and open air music in the summer, the cold winds have moved life indoors.
At The Book Cellar, right on the plaza, a small knot of lovers of the Chicago art scene gathered to see Chicago's own Tony Fitzpatrick and his Chicago-inspired collage art, available in book form and on a calendar benefiting the Chicago Art Foundation.
"When Ed Paschke died, the news media went to the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago to film examples of his work," Fitzpatrick recalled. "They discovered there was nothing of his hanging, though surely Paschke was on the level of anything hanging in these museums in his own city." (Some hanging Paschke works were found at Leslie Hindman Auctioneers, and a few days later, the big museums hastened to put their Paschkes up.) The Chicago Art Foundation is trying to foster Chicago's homegrown artists, Fitzpatrick said, and that's why he created a calendar of his collage art to benefit them.
Fitzpatrick has met young Chicago artists who are now working in New York "because they perceive more of an end-game available to them there," he noted. "Every May the art schools spill out graduates, but they aren't taught how to make a living."
His current storefront digs—where he developed his own brand of art studio involving people coming in and out, the phone ringing, UPS delivery people and others stopping to chat—works for him. "I went to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for one semester for printmaking and was asked to not come back," Fitzpatrick confessed, and he never looked back. In those early days, he took to the streets and did his work throughout the city, as a member of the audience laughingly confirmed. "I'd see you everywhere I went, just doing your art on the street," Joy Jackson recalled.
Here is a man who has saved possibly every piece of interesting paper he has come across and he has used them well. While his print work is intricate and interesting in its own right, similar designs are now interwoven with scraps of matchbook covers, '50s nudie girls, and written words in that grade school handwriting you could easily mistake for your own. The book, "Wonder Portraits of a City Remembered, Vol. I," is the first of a series, photos of the collages brightly springing from the good-sized pages.
Fitzpatrick's mural can be seen at the Old Town School of Folk Music. His books will expose him to a wider audience, at the same time helping a working, evolving, Chicago artist thrive and create in the same environment that inspires him.
Indeed, Fitzpatrick defines Chicago in his very being, his genial Michael Moore-like figure sartorially smoothed by a tailored wool jacket—"picked out by my wife"—all topped off by a Chicago White Sox cap.
And just as Fitzpatrick said Ed Paschke had supported young artists by showing up at their openings, Fitzpatrick was supported by local artist and filmmaker Tom Palazzolo and his wife Marcia Palazzolo, a bookbinder, who stopped by and got their purchases signed. |
