The Drawing Man
Of life, death, design, irreverence, travel, and drawing big.
“People see things…but they don’t really observe.”
I heard him say this more than once. Everything is a lesson in light, form, and proportion — if you have the wit to observe it. The same could be said about the difference between hearing music and actually listening to it. But to my father, Bryon Fitzpatrick, an industrial designer whose precision with pen and marker had earned him the title The Drawing Machine, observing everything with a critical eye was as much a worldview as it was a professional skill.
By the time I was born, my dad had already achieved enough to fill several lifetimes. An agitator from the get-go, he went against his own father’s wishes by studying design. What’s more, he built an entire course of study for himself. Industrial design wasn’t offered in the early 1950s in Brisbane, Australia, so he went to the head of the Queensland Institute of Technology and they cobbled together the college’s first industrial design program. After a stint designing cars at the British Motor Corporation in Sydney, and with a solid portfolio of other work underarm, he and my mother moved to Germany where he took a job at Ford. They spent the next several decades bouncing between Europe, the U.K., the United States, and…
