We don’t all get to achieve what we could have achieved in life. And yes, I know, so what? Tough luck. Cry me a river, build me a bridge and get over it. But, like it or not, some people really do have the odds stacked more heavily against them than others and yet somehow carry on regardless. In The Secret Painter, the scriptwriter Joe Tucker (Parents, Big Bad World) tells the true story of his Uncle Eric, born in 1932 – an ordinary man who never gave up.
Let’s be honest, The Secret Painter could have been absolutely terrible. I mean, it sounds like a bad idea: a biography of an overlooked northern artist written by his fancy, cosmopolitan, London-living nephew might easily have turned into an irritating meditation on the meaning of Art, and Family, and North vs South and the Class Struggle. It could have been told as the tale of some misunderstood genius or tragic outsider battling against the establishment. Rather, it’s a plain-speaking, thought-provoking, thoroughly sweet and unassuming story about a plain-speaking, thought-provoking, thoroughly sweet and unassuming working-class bloke from Warrington, whose delightful, self-defeating ordinariness is what makes the story extraordinary.
‘By any conventional measure,’ writes the author, ‘my uncle Eric Tucker achieved nothing in life.’ Which is true: he lived with his mother, worked as a labourer, liked a few drinks and putting on a bet and going out at the weekends to the clubs in Manchester. Just, life. But he was also quietly devoted to painting.
In the modest confines of his mother’s front room, behind a lace curtain and beneath a solitary lightbulb, in the evenings and at weekends, Eric would create his art – not for exhibition, nor in pursuit of fame, but simply because he felt compelled to do so.
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