By: Joseph Kemp
Recently I’ve dived into a large world of artists on social media as a whole and one such artist appeared to me extravagantly in the form of Erin Fitzpatrick’s portraiture. Consistently in the past few months I’ve been underwhelmed by the stream of endless digitized material that has covered my display on social media. It of course only worsened with the rather violent arrival of NFTs on the mainstream of art platforms.
Viewing her work was like a breath of fresh, compared to the stream of consciousness arriving on Twitter, Facebook, etc. Her stylistic and rather fun depictions of her oil paintings act as a brief reprieve from the chaos.
I recently caught up with her on Zoom and got a generous view into her creative process and also a direct sight into her recent endeavors. Including, but not limited to her large murals done for Kamala Harris when she was running for presidency. As well as the most recent occurrence with a general social explosion from posing in a photo with Martha Stewart, after she had finished a private commission for her.
She is now utterly swamped with work, yet she came off with such joy and happiness when discussing her work it was contagious.
Erin Fitzpatrick has to be one of the most open minded and hard-working artistic individuals working in Baltimore right now. So I would highly recommend checking out her work for yourself, though getting a commission might be difficult with a pretty heavily loaded work schedule.
Not only in this interview do we get a view within her process, but also get an inside look into what made her into the artist she is today.
JK: So when did you first find out you had a talent for art or an interest in art?
EF: I think the interest was always there. The first time I had teachers start noticing and saying things when I was in middle school. However I think high school is when having a gift for art showed up. That was where I was more recognized and in terms of learning art, I remember a time when I was 14 years old specifically when my teacher was having us draw a hand and it had to be coming out towards you. And all of a sudden it clicked in my brain to go from drawing like the Turkey hand to actually drawing the fingers like there’s space. I was creating the early illusion of space and I remember that learning process and it clicking and I kind of rolled onwards from that point. It also was because ever since I was a little kid, I was a quiet kid. So I’d just be drawing and drawing and drawing and drawing.
So where did you study art?
I went to MICA, but it’s funny because I didn’t really paint when I was there. I only took the basic painting classes than I needed like Painting I and Painting II since they were required to graduate. When I was there, I just wanted to learn all the different technical skills that I could. So I took tons of different classes to learn various skills during my time at MICA. I took classes about weaving, woodcarving, and tile making. I took all these classes because I just wanted to learn different skills and I didn’t really start painting. I’d really say most of that skill is self-taught because I think around 2008 was when I just picked up oil paints again and I’ve stuck with it since then.
When did you graduate from MICA?
I graduated in ’99.
So it’s listed that you are from Baltimore originally. How would you say that living in that city affected your body of work during college or following your graduation?
I would say that that influenced me to become a teacher first, especially because I graduated in ’99. Social media was pretty much non-existent. I mean teachers were just requiring us to use email around that time. So at the time I also was dealing with confidence issues like, I didn’t know what I was doing yet and I had the skill, but I didn’t know what I wanted to say with it. And so that’s when I decided that I was gonna teach. It helped that it was just three more semesters to add on to the degree I already had. So I figured I’d do that while I figured out what I was going to do with my life. Living in Baltimore at the time I thought, “You have to be in New York or L.A. to make it in the art world, maybe Miami, London, Paris, or Tokyo.”
I did give myself a limit, because I didn’t want to fall back on teaching forever. If teaching was my calling, I wouldn’t even question it, but I knew that I wanted to make art. So I said I’d do it for five years and no matter what going on, after that time I was going to quit. That’s what ended up happening, make no mistake I loved teaching. I liked it way more than I thought I was going to, the kids were really fun, and I never knew what was gonna happen. The school I taught at Lansdowne, it was a wild school, you know? But yeah, after those five years by then MySpace was the social media, which I had already figured out that I could use to promote myself.
I was actually doing street art at the time, something totally different than what I do now. Mostly cut stencils, spray paint, and stuff. I had my own personal MySpace at the time and then I had made another for my street art and I was using it to send these, screen printed and spray painted stencils all over the world. I’d say, well, I’ll send it to you for free if you send me a picture. So I was already using it, seeing what I could do with it and that was 2006. So that timing happened right at my fifth year. I knew though I wouldn’t make money with this right away. People might not see it right away, but there are tools now that I can be in Baltimore and do this. Plus Baltimore is inexpensive compared to some of those other cities, as far as being able to live is concerned.
One of the biggest issues artists of my generation deal with is feeling like you need to go to some major college to get anywhere in life. At my high school we were expected to go to a ludicrously expensive university straight out of high school. A lot of people like myself couldn’t or didn’t feel confident enough to do that. The reason I asked about Baltimore specifically was to see in terms of more physical forms of art what avenues are available to local artists. Or do they need to just go somewhere else to make it in their artistic careers?
I don’t think you need any of the schools at all. You know what I mean? Like you can learn on YouTube now, but the thing that I think school provides is just confidence. So you have a degree, cause I know I have friends who are super talented, but they don’t have that degree. And so they don’t believe that they can do it. So that degree acts as a confidence booster to the individual towards belief in their own skill level.
Yeah, I agree.
Personally however, I was obsessed with animation above all else. Way before I decided to major in animation. Especially 3D animation, I was obsessed with it as a kid just because it was just so different. Mainly because 3D wasn’t really a common thing at that time, but nowadays it’s become the face of a large portion of the animation industry. It’s the thing that everyone wants you to learn, learn how to do it in 3D, take what you’d know in 2D animation or 2D design and put it into a 3D perspective.
Is that exciting to you?
I love it. As a total entity the business of 3d animation, whether it be video game design, comic books, whatever movies, it doesn’t change a lot of the rules of animation because it just puts it onto a 3d plane. So even though it seems more difficult the core principles of all the elements I’m learning will translate and all it will take from is time to practice and learn different software. Not to mention the money will be great for a stable career option.
I feel like you can make as much money as you want doing what you want. Rather than focusing on what will pay you the best in the future. If you follow what you’re excited about. Like the thing where you feel , I don’t know, like that tingling up your spine, like when you feel your intuition and when you follow those things and you put your energy in those things, you can make money doing it. If you only think about how I am going to make money, you’ll end up looking like you’re trying to do something instead of being authentic about doing it as something you enjoy.
What do you try to express in your work? So things like emotions, themes, or certain imagery.
I’m really mostly what’s on there, there’s a lot of commissions… those are collaborations with my clients and I don’t get into those types of things quite as much. So what I try to do when it’s a commission for somebody’s family, somebody’s kid, or their wedding photo, I try to really capture the personality. A lot of times sometimes you see life in the eyes of paintings, but a lot of times, or if you like Google portrait art, you can get something that looks so three-dimensional, this person may have technical skill, but the eyes look dead?
When I looked at your art on Instagram as well as on a site titled Baltimore LED I it talked about your overall series of work and how you like to collect faces. Could you talk about that?
I’d say like, it’s something I do in my own work that’s a little different is I actually build a whole set. For clients I Photoshop a reference photo together. They might say; I want it to look like your gallery work, with all the plants, but I don’t have that in my house. I tell them they have to be wearing what they want in the, like in the painting. Because a lot of times, my clients are all over the world. So I’ve been flown to places to photograph them. But a lot of times they’re sending me digital evidence, but they want all this other stuff, the wallpaper, the plants. So I Photoshop all that together for them. Then I would say, well, what colors are gonna look good in your home? And I put together the image and they say, Oh, I don’t like that wallpaper, but I like that rug. And you know, and we kind of build this whole image. I actually like physically building a set, like I’ll paint the wallpaper myself, or I’ll get fabric and I pick a model and I have a wardrobe. I like creating a character, this way the person doesn’t have to show their personality like the commissions do. Cause it doesn’t matter who they are. I don’t even have to paint it to look like that because I’m the only one who knows, but I just want to give each painting the feeling as if this person is in this room, in this setting that we’ve built.
How would you describe your typical work process of your like commissions or of your own work?
Well, with commissions, people reach out to me via email, I have a price list they can choose from. It also explains, so right now I have about a 14 month wait. So if somebody puts it up they put down a deposit to hold a spot. Otherwise they don’t take anything seriously. Like people tell me all the time, I want some work, but they make the commitment of paying 50% upfront they’re still going to be committed to that. Whether it’s a year or two years, whatever, they have to wait for their time to start. It took me years to build that up, you know? So anyway they reach out and I say, well, this is my price list. I never one-on-one discuss money pricing cause I want them to, I don’t want to feel any pressure.
I also want them to not feel any pressure and I want them to be able to sit with it. I charge by size… Alot of portrait artists charge by how many faces or how much of the body is in it. I don’t want to force that on them if they can’t even have their painting for, you know, if I start it in a year and a half, they’re not going to get it for two years. If they can’t even have it for that long. I don’t want to give them all these choices. Well, “how many of our family members should be in it?” I just want them to pick a size that’s in their budget, make it as easy for them as possible. And then for me, the easy paintings will mellow out the difficult paintings. You know what I mean?
So once they decide what they want, they send me a deposit and I have both a digital version and a hard copy of the deposits in a book. So I just take down any notes that I can get, it doesn’t matter. It just has like their name, dates of their deposit, what they want. Some people say, well, I might upgrade later to a bigger size, so any notes I just have in this place. And then I have a backup on my cloud, so once we’ve done that when it gets closer to their time, we figure out the reference photo, um, whether they want me to shoot it, if they’re going to shoot it and they had known nothing about photography, I’ll say, well, you can shoot it on your phone.
My whole thing is I want it to be easy for them, you know, because I think ahead, like what is going to stop them from doing this job? If it’s not the money or the costs, or if it’s worrying about the time that they’re waiting for it, can they trust me? So I try to think of what their worries might be upfront and then reassure them through more talking. So we check in throughout the year, or chat on Instagram or whatever. I basically tell them once they’ve made a deposit, they have some access to me. Then we would work on the reference photo. Sometimes they know exactly what they want and they don’t need anything changed.
Sometimes it’s really complicated. Like they want me to build a whole room and Photoshop and I mean, we can go back and forth for a long time until we’ve settled on the photo, but I make sure I don’t start painting until they 100% approved and it’s cropped to the dimensions and everything, you know, because if they want me to change to a different idea, once I’ve done it, they’re going to pay for another painting, you know? I make sure all of this is discussed and approved. They’ve given it the final approval, then I work on it until it’s finished.
Do you have any varieties of medium you typically use for your commissions or for your personal work?
I’d say the only other thing is, I paint on wood. I don’t paint on canvas. I like those box panels. I just preferred them when I was figuring out supplies. It kind of goes back to when I was at MICA, I paid for all my own supplies. Not my parents, me with a job I had, so I was painting on cardboard. I was painting on wood. I was painting on these like less expensive, hard surfaces. And that was kind of how I learned to paint. So now I just naturally prefer something without the give that canvas has, so I like the hard surfaces instead. And then I use instead of a stiff bristle brush, I use a soft synthetic brush, like the white bristled kind.
How long do your paintings typically take on average to complete?
It really depends because as far as especially commissions, it depends on size and it depends on how complicated. I did a painting recently that took me a few days, and I had one that’s the same size that I’ve been just trying to get it right for about a year, but sometimes that’s cause I’m just putting it aside, because I can’t look at it for awhile. It’s really hard to say. I mean, people always ask, because they want to look at my price list and calculate the hours and figure out how much that is per hour. That kind of thing happens. Sometimes I spend just as much time going back and forth and back and forth with the client to decide on their reference photo as I do painting. Sometimes paintings just take a long time, you know, just so many variables are involved.
What’s your typical commission pricing for your work?
So I, I probably price as I was saying by the square inch. So the smallest I do and I don’t do as many of these anymore, but I’ll go to is a six by six inch. Then the biggest is like 48 by 72, without them also paying for custom. Because that’s as large as I can order the panels. I would say the average ones I’m working on, they’re usually in the $2,000 to $5,000 range . I have a client in Hawaii, for example, that I’m doing five paintings for, they’re getting one of each like four small ones and then they’re getting two foot by three foot of their whole family. So some jobs I get are bigger ones like that.
I found from a variety of sources that you’ve painted, either one mural or multiple murals for Senator Kamala Harris and several popular figures in the art world have paintings of yours. How would you say this reflects on your career or how your work is appreciated in the art world?
I mean, it all kind of has woven together. Like I got those jobs because I was putting my stuff out there, myself and other ways, and in social media and stuff. And then those jobs got me more, made more demand I would say some of those things, I don’t know if you saw the Martha Stewart one, but that one, that was a huge jump kind of overnight more than that other one, actually couldn’t even talk about it until it was pretty far out because, safety precautions of where the location of the mural is specifically the presidential headquarters when she was still running for president. So I had to sign an NDA. Like I couldn’t, say anything. I couldn’t. I talked to some of my friends about it. They knew where I was, but I mean, I couldn’t say, “Hey, Instagram, look what I did!” I mean, now it’s still a school, but there’s something about when it’s happening, being able to put it out there, that kind of makes a difference. I used to think those kinds of things were like, make it or break it. Like if I could have that happen, then I made it, you know, but it’s a, it’s an ongoing thing. And the nice thing about that is if something doesn’t work out, it’s not really that big of a deal because something else is coming through.
Source: @fitzbomb on Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/fitzbomb/?hl=en
I noticed that you were using Procreate recently. Do you have any other examples of digital works in your portfolio or are you mostly paint based?
I had to learn on a fly. Let’s see, it was December of 2019. I got offered a pretty big job through Airbnb and Hearst publications. They wanted five pieces in like four days. You can’t make very detailed drawings, nor can I make oil paintings in that time. I couldn’t make the one they wanted in that time. So I had basically that short amount of time to learn how to digitally paint. I’ve been wanting to learn it. I just had never gotten around to it, but having that, that deadline, it forced me to do it. I’ve done a little here and there. it was actually that one where I’m wearing like the unicorn that I just posted.
It was while I was reading your interview questions I was like, I needed to start doing digital stuff again because like, I don’t know how I feel about NFTs. And I know we’re going to talk about that in a second, but I thought, why not have some work ready? you know what I mean? So I just kinda sat down at that point and did that drawing. But yeah, it was like, unless you’re getting paid for something that’s gonna then be in print, it doesn’t exist. It exists only on the screen.
Source: @fitzbomb on Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/fitzbomb/?hl=en
How do you balance your work schedule while making pieces for yourself?
That’s something that’s like my goal right now. things were really steady going and I was doing pretty well and then a few things happened, like the Martha Stewart piece that she put me on her Instagram, us posing together. she took the photo, then she texted it to Snoop Dogg. Of course the next day my email was like, boom, boom, boom. I had all these interior designers in New York, working with all these people with wealth and all this was happening at once. So I took on a whole lot of that and my waitlist was already six to eight months to a year. It was already there, but it was really just like, I doubled my prices.
I knew I could quit any side jobs and I didn’t need side hustles anymore. So all that happened at once, but also all of a sudden I had no time to make my own work. So I’m actually doing a painting right now. It’s maybe the third image and on my Instagram currently with the Panther painting and like it’s a self portrait, it’s all part of the same painting. Those are just little thumbnails, but that’s the first thing I’ve done for myself in awhile due to all the new commissions coming in. It’s been a really long time since I’ve made a big developed painting for myself, that was for me. I’ve been trying to take less commissions during quarantine because it was quarantine and nobody knew what was happening with our finances, while trying to make space to make my own work more.
During either college, high school, any time in your life, what artists have had a major impact on your work?
For inspiration, I look less at art. It’s more like my travels, things out in the world because I don’t really want someone else’s paintings to influence my work. When I was in high school and college, of course you’re being shown this stuff cause they want you to have exposure. So I would say like the mid century realists, you know, Edward Hopper and Fairfield Porter, painters like that. It makes sense with the kind of brush strokes, and stuff that I use. But, there’s stuff that I like personally, like for my own aesthetic, but separate from wanting to influence my work. Like I’m always drawn towards whether it’s abstract or figurative or whatever it is. I’m always drawn towards people who really focus on the formal aspects of painting. Like I don’t care about photo realism. I’ve applied the skill, but I don’t care about it because there’s already a photograph, personally and like no disrespect to anyone who does that, because there are people out there who care about it. There’s an audience for every kind of thing. I want to see brush strokes and your composition and color and those types of things.
How long have you been an artist?
What do you mean? Like when I was born?
No, no, no like when did you stop working as a teacher and just decided to go all in as an artist?
I stopped working as a teacher in 2006. And so, and then like two years later in 2008 was pretty much when I decided I was going to paint full-time, but I still worked a job full time because I wasn’t making money yet. That was what I had decided, so now it’s been like 15 years since then, that I committed to doing what I’m doing now. Even if I had to work eighty or a hundred hours a week, it was because I wanted to still live like a grownup, like I wanted to be comfortable and have the things that I wanted and travel. So a lot of the time I was awake I’d work. I only slept a few hours and I worked, whatever job, I worked so many different odd jobs during that time, mostly bartending, and then I’d sleep for like five or six hours, sometimes less.
As the paintings started rolling in and I started getting more opportunities and then I was able to charge more. And as that grew, I would cut back on the hours.
I noticed that like, just from like a couple of different sources and articles and stuff that you have a really big focus on like huge portraits and like these beautiful portraits. Why do you focus specifically on that?
I did a lot of portraits in college. I always like to people watch, I mean, everything, there’s an infinite variety you could do, but portraits, I just really, I wanted to meet different people… before I was doing commissions and I was working with a lot of strangers, I would just get an idea like, “Oh, I’m going to paint everybody who works at this place”. So most of them I would already know and that’s how I had my in, but then I’d meet all the other people who I didn’t know. So it was like I was meeting tons of people. The first portrait series I did when I really in 2008, when I started painting, I painted all my coworkers at the bar where I worked when I quit teaching.
Do you have any large body of work that has different natures?
Everything else is like experiments right now I’ve been doing a little bit of the digital painting stuff. I’ve been making some little videos and stuff. Just stuff that’s entertaining to me right now because I’m trying to figure out what I want to do next. However, it’s all mostly the portraits right now.
All right. So what do you feel about the current stuff in the news regarding NFTs and the rise of it as profit for artists?
I think it’s wild, it’s so wild. I’m not sure how I feel about it yet. Like I’m not judging it yet. I mean, I have heard or read about like, it has a major environmental impact. Don’t love that, but it’s great for artists to be able to make money. I don’t know. I kind of feel like the art world is and how money has made us so arbitrary, and this just is more of that. I don’t judge that either it is, what is. I think in some ways it’s exciting. Like I was saying when I was first learning to create digital paintings, I got paid well for the digital paintings that I made, like the ones that Airbnb commissioned , like that was a good job, but then when I was just making them on my own, all I could do with them was really put them on Instagram, you know?
So I wasn’t making very many because how do you sell something that doesn’t really exist? So I think it’s exciting in that realm. I’m just kind of curious to see how it unfolds. I’m not against it, or for it necessarily. I’m just kind of observing it right now. And if it seemed right, I’d jump on it.
You know, I really like your approach to art. A lot of the times, when I talk to artists, a lot of them are the purists that act like you have to look at it from life. You can’t look at it from a photograph, you can’t paint from a photograph, but you negate these precursors almost entirely.
I mean, you can get hung up on what every single other person is doing, and decide if that’s okay or if that’s not okay, or you can just really stay focused on what you’re doing and make it the most awesome thing, you know?
Like only pay attention to yourself. When I was younger I would do it too. But who cares what somebody else is doing? Like, it doesn’t matter. It only matters what you’re doing.
So with all your current success and your incredibly long backlog of commissions, paid for, but waiting for you to make them, what do you think will be in the future for you as we enter a time where COVID is beginning to moderately subside?
I honestly have no idea. I’m excited about it. I’ve done a residency in the past and I’d like to do a residency program again. so basically I would go to a studio somewhere, somewhere in the world and not do any commissions and just work on my own experiments but I have, I got a couple jobs, during quarantine, a couple of big ones that, one I can tell you about and another one I can’t mention yet, but, um, where they’re going to be huge exposure sources for me. I also don’t know what’s going to happen when that happens. What I’d like to do in the future would be to take little to no personal commissions for private individuals, like people would have to apply.
I would like to do more of those kinds of things where I only have to take maybe one job a month, only working on one thing for somebody else. And then the rest of the time I’m making my own work. That’s what I’d like in the future. I think I’m gonna also put all my stuff in storage the summer when my lease is up and just travel for a while. I got a portable studio set up and, uh, I don’t know. I have like, I’m, I’m kind of just like ready for adventure. Ready to get into the unknown.
Sounds nice.
Should be nice. It’ll be weird. And if nothing else it’ll be entertaining.
Erin Fitzpatrick Social Links:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fitzbomb/?hl=en
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/erinfitzbomb/
Saatchi Art: https://www.saatchiart.com/erinfitzpatrick