The Secret Painter
Joe Tucker
Available as Hardback
A true story about class and ambition, loneliness and community, success and failure; told with real heart and humour it reminds us that the extraordinary can be found in the most unexpected places
Joe Tucker’s Uncle Eric was a beloved yet unconventional figure throughout Joe’s life. A shambolically dressed man who lived with his mother for almost eighty years, he had an almost compulsive need to charm strangers with working men’s club comedy routines, and appeared to exist only for daily trips to the bookie – and yet had also amassed over five hundred of his own remarkable paintings without anyone ever realising his achievements.
Towards the end of his life, Eric requested an exhibition of his work. As Joe and his family sorted through hundreds of paintings of street scenes, circus and theatre performers, and busy pubs, they began to ask more questions about Eric’s life: why had this fanatically sociable man never left his mother’s home? Had Eric ever experienced love when he painted it so beautifully? And what had driven him to create so much, yet share it so rarely?
In this touching, funny and thoughtful investigation of the nature of expression, the ownership of art and the secret life of those nearest to us, Joe Tucker brings us into his uncle’s extraordinary and compelling world. Perhaps more importantly, he also brings Eric Tucker’s life’s work into ours.
“The Secret Painter is so much more than a sentimental rags to riches yarn. Joe uses his uncle’s extraordinary life to tell a broader story about the way that working-class people in the twentieth century were excluded from art-making. [A] thoughtful, funny book”
the Times
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“A timely reminder that art did not originate as an investment opportunity or a get-rich-quick scheme but as a way for human beings to make sense of their lives (plus make them bearable into the bargain). Miracles happen in the most unlikely places”
Jarvis Cocker
”The Secret Painter is a bracingly northern corrective to the metropolitan hype and verbiage that surrounds so much art. [ … ] Joe Tucker writes with beautiful casualness”
observer
“This memoir is beautifully written, affectionate, witty and touching … With its idiosyncratic blend of serious purpose and disarming humour, The Secret Painter is a fitting tribute to its subject”
guardian
“A fascinating one-off biography, which lays out the hypocrisy and snobbery of this country’s “cultural elite” with an enviable lightness of touch [ … ] a book with steel in its heart”
ipaper
Joe Tucker
Joe Tucker originally trained as an animation director before becoming a television scriptwriter. With his scriptwriting partner, Lloyd Woolf, he has created and written the BBC shows Witless, Click & Collect and Black Ops.