Fitzpatrick sites as his major influences artists as diverse as Gustav Klimt, Alphonse Mucha, Harry Clarke, Hokusai, Hirosighe, Utamaro, Jack Kirby, Hal Foster and Barry Windsor-Smith. He was first exposed to the art of Aubrey Beardsley and Alphonse Mucha as a school leaver in the mid-sixties on a summer trip to London. There were major exhibitions of both artists at that time in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Fitzpatrick started his own poster company, aptly named 'Two Bare Feet', a project directly inspired by these exhibitions, which in turn inspired the London poster revolution. Suddenly posters were on every bedsit wall, and Fitzpatrick,a commited and impressionable Socialist felt that this was a cultural fast-track to bring his work to the masses and would bypass the traditional stranglehold of the then elitest galleries. His first venture into publishing was a series of posters, one of which was the by now legendary Che Guevara poster(1968). "I met Che Guevara in 1962 while working as a barman in a hotel in Killkee, Co. Clare. He was on an enforced stopover in Shannon airport and when he walked into the bar I recognised him immediately as I was a fervent admirer of Guevara, Fidel Castro, Camille Chienfuegos and the Cuban Revolution which succeeded in overthrowing the corrupt mafia-dominated Batista regime. We had a brief but very interesting conversation and he seemed very surprised that anyone recognised him. Not only did I recognise him but I also recognised his bodyguards, the Cuban revolutionaries Willy and Benjamin, who later died in Bolivia by his side.

I was very surprised to learn that he had an Irish background- his mother was a Lynch from Co.Cork- but he explained that he did not know a great deal about Irish history except that Ireland was the first country to break free from the British empire and thus hasten its downfall. The parallels with Cuba and Latin America were obvious and I didn't need them explained to me but he insisted anyway!. I was more curious about the Irish/Argentinian connection -to him the Irish/Argentinian community was very wealthy and very conservative: "Beggars on Horseback", I said, to which he replied "Polo playing Gauchos". I was so struck by him that years later I produced a very strange quasi-psychedelic drawing of him to commorate his arrival in Bolivia.

He was murdered towards the end of that same year at the behest of American agents in Bolivia. In response to this I produced a poster of that same drawing which was reprinted in magazines such as Private Eye in Britain and a number of European and American political magazines. I made the image copyright free and within a couple of months it had become a universally known icon, paraded on banners, posters and t-shirts, from the tear gas filled streets of Paris '68 to the campus's of Berkley California and Kent State".