The Secret Painter
‘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
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. 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? Joe Tucker is a television scriptwriter, who, with his scriptwriting partner, Lloyd Woolf, has created and written the BBC shows Witless, Click & Collect and Black Ops.
