The Secret Painter, like the best family memoirs, is a reckoning with the apparent unknowability of those we think we know best. When Eric Tucker died, aged 86, in 2018, he left behind a terraced house in Warrington strewn with the remnants of a lifetime’s hoarding. His nephew Joe, a screenwriter, has penned this searching, touching tribute to his uncle’s roisterous, creatively productive life.
Among the mess, his family discovered more than 500 of Eric’s paintings: watercolours, for the most part, depicting working-class scenes set against backdrops of terraced streets, pubs and industry.
A self-taught artist who as a young man gained a professional boxing licence, he emerges as a larger-than-life personality: over the course of the book, Eric argues vehemently, jokes relentlessly, and is unflinchingly stubborn in his views; he’s prone to colourful tales that exhibit the same loving exaggeration that characterises his artistic output.
The obvious comparison in terms of subject matter is the work of LS Lowry, but Eric’s scenes are far more voluptuous – flat-cap Rabelaisian even – depicting the everyday joys observed while sitting in a bar or nightclub, sketchbook in hand. He has something of the caricaturist in his line, paying close attention to the profile of a face: chins, noses are limned with a degree of playful overstatement and often accompanied by a pursed half-smile. He’s drawn to lines of sight: who’s staring at who. There’s a fleshiness to his depictions: characters occupy their space comfortably and never appear ill at ease. His paintings are a compendium of characters encountered during his nights out, often spent in nearby Manchester after a day visiting the city’s galleries.
The New Nuclear Age by Ankit Panda: Could ‘growing loose talk’ lead to the ultimate disaster?
Author Seán Farrell: ‘Dermot Bolger said there was a whiff of silage off my novel. I think that was a compliment’
Beartooth by Callan Wink: Spare and remarkable
Books in brief: The Princess of 72nd Street; The World Administered by Irishmen; The Lamb
As a work of biography The Secret Painter is compelling. It excavates, as much as is possible, the inner life of a man, suffering from arthritis from middle-age onwards, who lived most of his life in the family home, painting in the sanctuary of the front room. The author examines aspects of his uncle’s life – thwarted romantic attachments, encounters with the art world that end in self-sabotage – to create a complex, multilayered portrait of an ostensibly ordinary life.
It excavates, as much as is possible, the inner life of a man who lived most of his life in the family home
The book makes well-earned points about the difficulty of working-class participation in cultural industries and, when Eric’s posthumous exhibition comes, it’s a bittersweet triumph. The real mystery of the book is why artists create with no hope of wider acknowledgment, a compulsion that to the outside world might well resemble madness.
