TONY FITZPATRICK’S OUR JOE IS ALL ABOUT CHICAGO NOSTALGIA, A LOOK AT THE CITY’S MIDDLE-CLASS MEAN STREETS HUNG ON THE HOOK OF A WHITE SOX BATTER.

A few years ago, in an interview about John Lennon’s art work, Yoko Ono told me that rock ’n’ roll was a "working class" phenomenon in contrast to visual art, which she called an "elitist" endeavor. That struck me as a little off-key. While it is true that some (but certainly not all) art collectors are rather elitist in outlook, those who actually make the art come from almost every imaginable background. Tony Fitzpatrick is a case in point.

  Fitzpatrick hails from Chicago, but not the modern yuppie Chicago. On the contrary, Fitzpatrick’s is the grimy old Chicago that Carl Sandburg once called the "hog butcher of the world." Its epicenter is a neighborhood known as "Bumtown," the native turf of Fitzpatrick’s father who sold cemetery vaults, burial insurance and embalming fluid as he patrolled its scruffy streets in his old Oldsmobile. Of Bumtown, Fitzpatrick has written, "I wanted to know the secrets of slaughtered cattle and exploding scoreboards. Of my mother and father’s great romance on 72nd Street. I wanted the city to give up its litanies of the living and the dead. … The Irish dead still talk a lot in this city."

  As a child, Fitzpatrick often accompanied his father on his mission to provide death-care supplies to anyone who wanted them, and his experiences now live in memory and in his art. Especially now that his father, James Fitzpatrick, has departed for that celestial Bumtown in the hereafter. Typically inspired by chance, destiny and fate, Fitzpatrick this time around takes his cues from his recollections of a bygone world seen from the window of an Olds Rocket 88 loaded to the gills with embalming fluid.

  Compared with his colorfully extroverted earlier prints, this new black-and-white stuff may seem a little pale. But look a little closer and all of the telltale signs are there, from the tattoo-like compositions to the Moon Mullins-style of irony, a pathos of racing forms and Valentines stained with tears and spilled beer. It works well enough in Our Joe, a 5-by-6-inch etching featuring a White Sox batter with droplets of sweat, or tears, streaming down his face. All around him a miasma of Bumtown’s past seems to hover in space: a thicket of smokestacks and telephone poles, a bird on a wire, a runaway circus elephant, some ghosts of ball players as well as other, more furtive figures in the shadows of back streets incised with railroad tracks and punctuated with spiky weeds and precocious rats. These are old-time mean streets, no doubt about it, but made rich with the patina of time and memory.

  Fitzpatrick knew them all too well himself. A former small-time co-conspirator in a Mafia chop-shop operation before his rise to fame as an artist and poet, Fitzpatrick, in his former life, was nearly killed when he made a high-speed wrong turn and accidentally drove through an apartment building. He somehow survived, though the same can’t be said for the car. With survival came revelation, light, redemption: he became reflective and began to draw. And to write. Like most writers and artists, he wrote and drew what he knew: Bumtown and the expanded cosmos of greater Bumtown, a realm that might include Coney Island and perhaps our own Fairgrounds horse track for that matter. Anyplace where racing forms, sports betting, tattoos and penny arcades predominate might serve as fodder for his mystical vision of chance, folly and fate.

  In Lost Harbor a female form dominates the composition. She stands foursquare, staring slightly off to the side, but her face has no features. She is made entirely of bricks like an old-time factory. Behind her, a gritty industrial cityscape of warehouses and steel girders shapes the horizon as airplanes fall out of the sky. Docks, conveyor belts and wrecking balls complete the picture and anyone who has ever lived in a big old city knows this scene. (What they may know of the industrial brick Madonna is optional, personal, none of our business, but she completes the landscape.)

  Like Beethoven’s later quartets, Fitzpatrick’s Bumtown etchings may seem a little spare or even severe at times, but they may also be among his most reflective efforts. By contrast, the prints and drawings of Nick Bubash on the adjacent walls, while interesting, are mostly flash and dazzle. A tattoo artist by trade, Bubash has a vision that meshes neatly with Fitzpatrick’s, but he lacks the latter’s unexpected and unlikely depth – the psychic legacy of a bygone Bumtown seen through the chrome baroque window of an Olds Rocket 88.