As an academic sociologist for 30 years (1990-2020, University of New Hampshire), Tucker spent much of his time studying people on the margins of society, including those who struggle with themselves and the world around them. He was always stuck by how facial expressions reflected internal and external struggles, but he found that neither words nor photographs fully captured such struggles.  Painting, he discovered, allows an exploration of the human face, and its complex expressions, in a deeper and often abstract way as he experiments with various compositions, colors, and textures. He discovered too that painting forces himself to examine and put on canvas, often subconsciously, visual representations of my own mental states and struggles.