The Secret Painter
Joe Tucker, Canongate, £18.99

IT’s never been easy for non-London painters to gain recognition. The art world, like that of publishing, music, performing arts, and the media, is headquartered in the capital, and is as insular and class-bound as it is geographically lazy. As Raymond Williams observed in Keywords, “regional... can be used to indicate a ‘subordinate’ or ‘inferior’ form”; as, he notes, can “provincial”. That book was published in 1976. It’s still depressingly true.

Was this part of the reason Eric Tucker never quite believed his work was worthy of a show? Was this why, as he might have put it, he couldn’t be doing with all the fuss, instead continuing to work as a labourer until being forced into early retirement by chronic arthritis? Was it just too unrealistic a prospect for a northerner, born in 1932, who began work when he was 14, to become an artist?

His nephew, Joe, the author of this funny, moving and thoughtful biography, sees it as his duty to obtain some kind of recognition for Eric after his death, in 2018, at the age of 86. He also sets about interrogating why it is that Eric – who painted more than 400 paintings over several decades – never got taken up by the art world. Part of the story has to do with Eric Tucker’s personality – he could seem off-hand, even rude, and ungrateful – but it also has to do with the circumstances of his upbringing and times.

He discreetly made sketches, working on his lap while in pubs and clubs. He lived in Warrington, about as overlooked a town as you can get, and one that came bottom, out of 325 towns and cities, of a “Heritage Index” – a sort of cultural ranking – issued by the Royal Academy of Arts in 2015. He painted brilliantly, but secretly, stashing his work away in the unused upstairs rooms of his terraced house.

Eric loved galleries, tripping into Manchester to spend hours at the Whitworth and City public collections. He rarely spoke, even to family or friends, about his art, and almost never talked about exhibiting it. In 1995, he quietly entered an open-call art exhibition at his local museum and art gallery in Warrington; the painting was purchased for the museum collection. Was this a moment he might have built on? Probably not: he didn’t attend the opening.

Joe’s father – the artist’s brother – had tried to encourage him to show his work, including entering a painting into the Royal Academy’s Summer Show – without success. Two paintings were sold through Manchester’s Tib Lane Gallery, but Eric complained about the commission (“Bloody hell, I do all the work!”) and, for reasons that never became clear, a third painting was taken back home and the relationship ended.

These brief forays into the art world suggest a tension. Eric wanted to be appreciated but didn’t find it at all easy. Is there any less inviting space for a member of the working class than a private gallery? He loved art and painting, but dressed in a manner “designed to put tramps at ease,” and was unwilling to play a part to get on. He was proud of his work, but shy about articulating why he did it and the satisfaction it gave him.

All this makes The Secret Painter an engaging read. Joe Tucker, an accomplished television director and screenwriter, skilfully evokes his late, much-loved uncle, as well as the backdrop of post-industrial South Lancashire. The latter matters as there is something quintessentially Warringtonian about Eric; in a soap-making, beer-brewing, rugby league town, there’s little expectation of success, glamour, fine art, or of anyone from the outside valuing its opinion or wares.

Like most people, Eric was complex. He was once a boxer and looked hard and masculine. He was drily funny, with a gift for mimicking his comedic heroes, such as Ken Dodd. He lived with his mother and stepfather for years, and had a notably awkward relationship with the latter. He was a hoarder and liked to deal in scrap metal. His home life looked chaotic; we imagine a garret like something out of La bohème but the real thing – and Eric’s house was the real thing – is messy, grim, uncool, and a world away from Paris.

These are surface details. For Joe, Eric is a peer – like an older brother, and living like a lad himself (ie with parents) but also “almost a third parent.” There was also “something interminably solitary about him,” which has been said of many a true artist – and this despite the fact that his paintings are full of people and life. As for his inability to make the necessary moves to penetrate the art world, as Joe Tucker puts it: “As far as he was concerned, it was among the very lowest echelons of society that the richest life was to be found;” and again, “Formality, decorum, status: these were fictions that got in the way of camaraderie, humanity and the real stuff of life.” Having created art out from the people around him, he was unable and unwilling to fake it in order that those outside these echelons could display it, take a cut and, ultimately, buy it to hang in their affluent homes.

Joe makes some sense of his uncle’s contradictions. Reflecting on disparate memories, and talking to his father and to Eric’s old boxing friend Buller Crompton, he shows his uncle had a previous life: that he was once a “rambunctious socialiser,” that he often befriended “singular” men, that he liked to set off on solo adventures around the country. Joe explores Eric’s sexuality and why he didn’t conform to the norms of his milieu – the marrying, the kids, the home-building. He uncovers family tragedies and romantic failure. He connects Eric’s mistrust of the middle classes to his negative experience of national service. He was not always dishevelled, lonely and, as he saw it, “ugly.” The art served to keep his past world and life alive – perhaps that’s why he pursued it so diligently, so privately, and so uncompromisingly.

Eric Tucker is now somewhat recognised. His nephew successfully generated interest in the work through savvy PR, showing off the work and through this book. His uncle is a newly accredited member of the loosely defined “Northern School” that includes the likes of Theodore Major, Sheila Fell, Harold Riley and Alan Lowndes – all of whom have been acclaimed and enduringly neglected.

As a working-class artist Eric Tucker didn’t produce provincial or regional or “working-class art” – not if those categories are taken to pigeonhole or in any way diminish it. The paintings are not so much grittily realistic as dreamily intimate, with impressionistic renderings of skin and hair, and a sadness in the eyes that might actually be honesty and tiredness. Unlike Lowry – with whom he has inevitably been compared – the people are close-up, rounded and often fleshly.

The stories they tell are town stories, but there is a jazz edge to some; Warrington and Manchester, in their cups, might almost be fin de siècle Vienna. Does the art world get them? Not in the way it got dead sharks or dirty bedsheets. When Eric Tucker’s work was shown in Warrington “many of those most moved by the work were, of course, working-class people – people very much like my uncle's characters, who didn't necessarily look like committed gallery-goers.”

Art can be naive and sophisticated at the same time. It can be local and universal. It can be superb and unknown. There must be many small attics full of paintings and poems and novels and music that will never get a chance to find an audience. It’s a huge pity Eric Tucker never received fair praise during his lifetime, though I’m not sure if sales would have changed his lifestyle.

This excellent, fondly told, politically astute, book helps fill the void left by the unwritten reviews and gushing articles.

For more information about Eric Tucker see: erictucker.co.uk