Two Smokers

artwork by Eric Tucker (1932–2018)
Hanson's Factory

artwork by Eric Tucker (1932–2018)
Barside sketch

artwork by Eric Tucker (1932–2018)
William Tarr Builder

artwork by Eric Tucker (1932–2018)

I had almost forgotten the painting Ready for Christmas. A view of one of the main shopping streets in our hometown, Warrington, my uncle Eric Tucker painted it in 1995 in the front parlour – his painting room – of the council house he shared with his mother and stepfather. This was the modest setting where he produced all his paintings, though none of us ever saw him at work. My grandparents perhaps caught glimpses, though they, like him, never spoke about it.

At the gentlest encouragement of my dad, his younger brother – because you had to tread carefully in such appeals to my uncle – Eric entered this painting into an open-call exhibition at the local museum and gallery. It was the only time, in the 36 years our lives overlapped, that I knew my uncle to make any effort to show his work in public.

After being accepted into the show, the painting was acquired for Warrington Museum & Art Gallery's collection. Eric had effectively 'won' the exhibition. Not that he told us this; my mum spotted it when we attended the exhibition's opening – at which Eric was absent. My uncle, you may now be gathering, was not one to blow his own trumpet. The painting then disappeared into the museum's store cupboards, only to emerge 23 years later following Eric's death in 2018 – when, after a lifetime in obscurity, he hit national headlines.

Secrecy was woven into Eric's artistic practice. He would sit in pubs and sketch the drinkers, holding his scrap of paper or sketchpad just below the table top, out of sight. (My dad witnessed him working like this a couple of times; I saw it just once.)

Wearing a shabby grey jacket and a haircut self-administered with kitchen scissors, Eric made himself easy to overlook. He certainly didn't look like an artist, and a skilled one at that. He looked like what he also was: a manual labourer, a man most at home in the bookmakers or Wetherspoons. It sums up his entire, six-decade painting 'career': not deliberately hidden, but generally pursued so quietly, so unassumingly, that the effect was almost the same.

It was only at the very end of Eric's life that we began to realise just how much work he had produced. To enter his and my grandparents' house, with the door to the front room pulled to, as it generally was, there was little evidence of Eric's artistic output. Only one of his paintings – a small, early portrait – hung on the walls, halfway up the stairs. In fact, we eventually realised after his death, there were some 550 oils and watercolours stashed in all corners of the house – and drawings too numerous to count.

Eric's images were of the world he inhabited: the pubs, the clubs, the back streets and alleyways – working-class life, with a capital L, in the industrial north. And scenes of the circus and theatreland. Not the glitz but the tawdry glamour – the lives of workaday performers.

Ready for Christmas is typical of an Eric Tucker street scene – and also not. The buildings are crisply defined against a smoggy sky – particularly Yates' Wine Lodge, a long-time haunt of his. It is present day, as the date on the balloons above Eric's unusual spelling of 'Exmas' (his education ended at 14) plainly tells us, but the slightly spectral characters look to be from a bygone age.

1995, oil on board by Eric Tucker (1932–2018)

Also typical of Eric-world, there's a touch of the fairground or circus: the aforementioned balloons, which are not exactly seasonal, and the character in the white hat, bottom left, who looks almost like a clown or 'Pierrot'. There's his mix of an accomplished eye alongside 'naive' elements that the art critic, Ruth Millington, called a 'sophisticated innocence'. It's a reflection of his rather singular creative journey – though his schooling ended early by today's standards, his self-education in art was lifelong.

Less typically, this isn't a view of a back road or side street, like many of Eric's paintings, but a main thoroughfare: a busy shopping street. He painted Ready for Christmas a couple of years after two bombs detonated in Warrington town centre. He was there when it happened: not in the street targeted, but one close by. Was this image in any way a response to that? That life in the town had long existed and continued to do so? Perhaps it's too much to load onto a picture that was, like others, simply my uncle capturing his world even as it disappeared around him.

These are the kinds of questions I can't ask him. Not that there's any guarantee he would answer if I could, so tight-lipped was he about his art-making.

Like his art, much of my uncle's life was hidden or rather secret: not by design, but because, never having had a long-term relationship or a family of his own, he lived a very solitary existence – though certainly not a quiet one. 'Where's our Eric now?!' was my grandmother's regular refrain, she once told me. This was one reason for my writing a book about my uncle: having only belatedly come to appreciate his achievements, I realised, though we were close, I also hardly knew him.

I wanted to understand what had formed such an extraordinary-yet-ordinary character. And as his artistic journey was so solitary, so self-contained, I wondered what it said about the creative spirit: how and why had he come to art when there was so little of it around him, and sustained such a committed practice with apparently little thought or hope of recognition?

The book – titled The Secret Painter – also tells the story of my uncle's quite incredible, posthumous ascension to public attention – though, to date, Ready for Christmas remains his only work in a public collection. To that end, I hope that Eric Tucker's story isn't over – that there are chapters still to write.

Joe Tucker, writer and nephew of Eric Tucker

The Secret Painter is published by Canongate Books. You can learn more about the artist at erictucker.co.uk