The story below is from our September/October 2024 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
Our 50th anniversary issue's cover re-creation is thanks to Eric Fitzpatrick, an award-winning and beloved local artist who paints with either hand.
Which iconic Roanoker cover did you choose and why? I thought, rather than photograph myself, why not do a bunch of self-portraits? I do them all the time, which is the bigger side of me nobody knows.
Briefly describe the process of recreating this cover and how you chose to interpret it. It was great fun to do. The self-portraits are right-handed and left-handed; the left-handed are more interesting because they’re bolder, the marks painterly. The right hands are more exact and record the reality; the left hand has more feeling. So it’s interesting to work with those hands along the way; I got injured long ago and ripped the tendon to my bicep so much I could not paint with my right arm, so I had to go left-handed … My friends call me an ‘amphibious’ artist to make fun of the title. I still work with the left hand, and these self-portraits; it’s interesting to paint with the other hand because it’s a whole different way. Because they’re not the fine motor skills in the dominant hand, I think you have less accurate strokes and you’re not trying to model the form so much, so it becomes more linear, more gesture, more raw. Less likeness, too, but I like the painting more, to be honest.
Eric Fitzpatrick
Where can readers find more of your work? They can Google me and see a lot of my work as well as some tours through the studio; the best tour is one Taubman Museum of Art hosted during COVID, where we zoomed a tour of the studio and talked about the work, which you can still find online.
Born in Roanoke, Eric Fitzpatrick was inspired by his folk artist father and writer mother, nurturing a lifelong passion for art. He studied at Virginia Tech and became proficient in watercolor, pastel, acrylic and oil. A 1998 injury led him to paint ambidextrously, earning accolades for his left-handed work. Eric’s art is featured in museum and corporate collections across 19 countries. He has also taught at Virginia Tech, Hollins University and the University of Georgia in Cortona, Italy. You can find Eric on Instagram at @ericfitzpatrickartist.
The story above is from our September/October 2024 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!