The accidental icon creator

Five years after meeting Che Guevara in a Co Clare pub, Jim Fitzpatrick created the image of him which defined an era. He tells Lara Marlowe, in Paris, why he's never been interested in claiming the royalties.

It's hard to find anyone over the age of 40 who does not have memories of Jim Fitzpatrick's simple, stylised poster of Ernesto "Che" Guevara. Anne Anderson, the Irish Ambassador to France, had the Che poster on the wall of her room at university. I bought a Che T-shirt on my first foreign reporting job, in Nicaragua in the 1980s.

When I told an academic friend that I was meeting the Irish artist who created the poster, he asked me to thank Fitzpatrick. "Decades ago, I chatted up an Irish girl in front of Notre Dame Cathedral," he explained. "She had dinner with me and stayed the night at my hotel, because of the red Che T-shirt I was wearing. She borrowed the shirt and wore it when she left for London the next morning, and she was wearing it when she looked me up at the LSE a few days later."

Jim Fitzpatrick was a self-taught graphic artist when he came across a striking photograph of the Cuban revolutionary, Ernesto "Che" Guevara, by Alberto Diaz Gutierrez (known as Korda) in German magazine Sternin 1967. He made a line drop-out of Korda's photograph, which he submitted to Scenemagazine in Dublin with an article about the revolutionary's move from Cuba to Bolivia. Did he know how good the image was, I ask him. "Oh I did. Oh yeah," he says, almost longingly.

Scenemagazine spiked the article and the image. "I had his famous call to arms," Fitzpatrick says. "You know, 'wherever death may find us . . .', all about the rattle of machine guns, so they thought it was OTT."

Che was tracked down and murdered 40 years ago last month by a Bolivian CIA agent, soon after Fitzpatrick had created his first Che image. The following year, he showed the version that became the iconic image, at the Viva Cheexhibition in London. The stark black, red and yellow poster "took off like a rocket", Fitzpatrick says. "I just kept supplying, supplying, supplying. I couldn't afford to keep getting it photographed, which is why I had to make all these variations."

Andy Warhol was the first to recognise Fitzpatrick's paternity of the image. His nine fluorescent-coloured silkscreen images of Che were accompanied by a notice that the artwork "may be derived from an image by the Irish artist Jim Fitzpatrick". A Che exhibition that has travelled from Los Angeles to Mexico, London to Munich and, most recently, Barcelona has also recognised his authorship. Fitzpatrick might have earned millions from the Che image, but he never charged for it, never copyrighted it and does not seek royalties now.

"My attitude was very simple," he says. "I was absolutely enraged by the manner of his death. He was shot in the neck and left to drown in his own blood, because they didn't want to harm his face, so they could prove it was him. I was trying to get people to notice this man had been murdered."

FITZPATRICK WOULD LIKEto donate his claim to the Che image to the children's hospital in Havana. "I want to hand over all the original artwork which I have, and a big painting, to the Che Guevara Lynch archive run by his widow, Aleida March," he says. "That's how the story will end. I want to go to Cuba and hand over the whole lot."

Fitzpatrick is not only an artiste engagéand pacifist revolutionary. He has been an integral part of the music scene in Ireland since the early 1970s. Though the 1970s and 1980s were "blighted by violence", Fitzpatrick recalls the creativity of the period with fondness, in particular his association with Thin Lizzy and its lead singer, black Irishman Philip Lynott.

Fitzpatrick and Lynott used to walk past each other in the street. "He had a big Afro, and I had red hair down to my waist, and he'd walk down one side of Grafton Street and I walked down the other and we'd always nod," Fitzpatrick says. "We knew we were heads. Just heads. Not dopeheads, not head cases, just heads. You were more than usual. I knew who he was and he knew who I was, but you don't walk up to someone in Dublin and introduce yourself. Somebody has to introduce you."

The poet Peter Fallon made the introduction. "Peter was part of the only [poetry and music] beat group in Europe at the time, called the Tara Telephone," Fitzpatrick continues. "[The US poet] Allen Ginsberg came over to see us. We thought we were it. We used to have poetry readings in dingy rooms in Parnell Square, and somebody got up and played the guitar. We had a little magazine called Capellaand we had support from people like John Lennon, Dave Bowie, Mark Boland - all the more lyrical rock poets, as we called them."

Fitzpatrick has designed countless record album covers, often for free. "The first images I did for Thin Lizzy were very Marvelcomic," he says. "Then they got more sophisticated. I began to bring in heavy metal Celtic art. Eventually I went iconic with a very famous cover I did called Black Rose."

Fitzpatrick's education by Franciscan fathers at Gormanston in Co Meath has often influenced his art. He recalled Joseph Mary Plunkett's poem, I See His Blood Upon the Rose. "So I put this little droplet of blood coming out of the rose, and it really made it."

Revolutionary politics, rock music, football, Christianity, women and Celtic mythology are the disparate loves that make up Jim Fitzpatrick. He created his first piece of Celtic art in 1969, and began to study the subject in earnest.

"I was arrogant enough to think I could recreate monastic art in all its glory," he says. "I've had a fair shake at it."

Working from Dineen's Irish dictionary, Fitzpatrick translated books from middle Irish, Latin and Gaelic. His Book of Conquestsand Erin Sagahave sold well for decades, and he is preparing two books, The Celtic Art of Jim Fitzpatrickand Mostly Women, for publication next year.

Fitzpatrick's Celtic images are immediately recognisable. "I live off the royalties," he says. "There are calendars, cards, posters, place mats - everything created from those works."

Geoffrey O'Byrne White, the chief executive of CityJet, telephoned Fitzpatrick and asked him to do six paintings of Irish islands for the boardroom of Cityjet's new headquarters in Swords.

"It's unusual for me to get a decent commission, and that was a decent commission," Fitzpatrick says.

The fantastical, brightly coloured pen, ink-and-acrylic island paintings took a year to complete and were this week loaned to the Irish College in Paris, which CityJet sponsors, for exhibition.

FITZPATRICK WILL TURN64 on December 29th. He has a plan for what he calls "the final phase of my life": painting with oils on canvas, non-stop.

"All my life I've had one real ambition, which is to be a painter," he says. "I'm painting only two subjects, landscapes and women. I get up at eight o'clock every morning, which is spectacular for me; I used to go to bed at that time. I don't go clubbing. I live a very simple life and I enjoy every minute of it. I jump out of bed to paint. I got to the point with the Celtic art where it wasn't doing it for me any more. I was enjoying it, but I wasn't jumping, and I like to jump."

Sometimes Fitzpatrick paints until 10pm in his apartment facing the sea in Howth. "I am beginning to create what I hope will be iconic images one day," he says. Like Che?

"That would be the ideal, that I will produce something of that ilk, but in pure fine art," he replies. "I don't do it deliberately, but these things seem to happen. Sooner or later, I create an icon, almost accidentally."

• Jim Fitzpatrick's exhibition,The Islands , runs at the Irish Cultural Centre in Paris until Jan 11 2008.

When Jim met Che: a revolutionary in Kilkee

By a twist of fate, Jim Fitzpatrick met Ernesto "Che" Guevara five years before he designed the iconic poster of the doomed Argentinian-born revolutionary.

Fitzpatrick was working as a bartender at the Marine Hotel in Kilkee, to earn money for a pilgrimage to Rome. Though a mere teenager, he'd been passionate about politics since the 1956 Hungarian uprising.

"I was on the side of any rebels, anywhere. If they were agin it, I was agin it," he explains.

So Fitzpatrick had followed the Cuban revolution and recognised Che the moment he walked into the pub, wearing a London Fog raincoat. Guevara was Cuba's finance minister at the time. His Aeroflot flight was grounded by fog at Shannon airport, en route from Moscow to Havana.

"I hadn't the nerve to ask too many questions," Fitzpatrick recalls. "He told me his father's grandmother, Isabel Lynch, was from Cork, though I later learned she was from Galway. He was very proud of the fact that the Irish were the first to begin to bring down the British empire.

"He described the Irish in Latin America as 'white lace'. They were upmarket; his family and the Irish in Latin America in general. I asked what they were like, and he said 'gauchos on horseback' and I remembered my mother saying 'beggars on horseback' to talk about people who'd risen above their station."

Fitzpatrick remembers Che as "a roguish, charming, Irish-Argentinian revolutionary". When Che was murdered, he notes, "the first thing his father said was, 'Che died like a true Irish revolutionary'. That kind of stuff had a lot of resonance with me."