Jimmie Fitzpatrick, the artists father, was a well known and talented photo-journalist in Dublin with the Irish Independent and the Irish Times. His early promise was dissipated in an alcoholic haze and the family fortune squandered as a direct result of his addiction to gambling.

As the artist himself describes it "One day I was living in a beautiful house by the sea, the next morning I woke up in the garden shed. I was five and my mother liked a lash of the old Laudanum, so I was out cold for most of that exciting night when the old man took out his pistol, tried to blow his brains out, missed, and put a bullet through the floor and the ceiling of my bedroom, missing my cot and myself by a hairs breath.

The next morning, after the boys in blue had taken him away, I woke up in the garden shed with my mother beside me below a brace of smelly dead curlews, hanging from a beam above us (My father was a keen sportsman and a crackshot when he wasn't out of his face). That same day the house which had been repossessed was occupied by its new owners, who let us stay on in the shed for a further two weeks until my mother sorted out new accommodation in Dublin.

I only saw my father again once or twice after this when we visited him in hospital in Grangegorman where he was incarcerated, drying out with more than a few of his colleagues from the Irish Times. He was surrounded by such luminaries of Irish cultural life as the artists Cecil French-Salkeld, Sean O'Sullivan, Flan O'Brien (Miles na gCapaleen) and another of his mates, whom discretion forbids me from mentioning i.e. he still has relatives, I know, alive and kicking."

From this point on the young Fitzpatrick was raised by his mother and his aunts and spent all of his formative years being educated and enlightened in the company of four highly intelligent and very forceful women. It was this formative period of his young life that shaped in his mind the archetypal stereotype of the female that is endlessly familiar in his work today and that often spills over into his real and actual life.