FitzGerald's painting depicts a bust of Hesiod, the Greek poet (circa 750 BC). His Theogony is a large-scale synthesis of a vast variety of local Greek traditions concerning the gods, organized as a narrative that tells how they came to be and how they established permanent control over the cosmos. It is the first known Greek mythical cosmogony. Not much is known about the actual life of Hesiod. He says that his father left his home at Aetolian Cyme because his life of sea-trading was unprofitable; "he settled near Helicon in a miserable hamlet, Ascra, which is bad in winter, sultry in the summer, and good at no time." FitzGerald's painting renders the poet's sculptural features as a kind of intricate topography. We sense the fullness of the head and the violence of the broken-off nose, the stern gaze coming from a past most distant.

FitzGerald completed his Bachelor of Arts in Art and Art History at Sheridan/University of Toronto Mississauga in 2001. A selection of his exhibitions in public galleries include the following: The Painting Project - Galerie de l'UQAM, Montreal (2013); Quebec and Canadian Art, 1980-2010: New Acquisitions, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal (2011); Empire of Dreams: Phenomenology of the Built Environment, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto (2010); Carte Blanche: Volume 2 - Painting, Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto (2008).