He was born in Gap, Pennsylvania in 1908 and attended the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, graduating with honors in 1933. After winning a scholarship for a trip to Europe, he settled in Chicago where he worked for the Works Progress Administration and had his first solo exhibition at the Benjamin Krohn Gallery in 1940.
In 1946, he moved to Brooklyn Heights, New York, teaching at New York University City College and from 1956 to 1985, the Pratt Institute. In New York, his style became increasingly abstract. Using Poured oil paint thinned with turpentine and unstretched canvases which are often cut and sewed to accomodate overlapping designs, Schucker has achieved a personal imagery quite unike that of other “pourers,” such as Morris Louis.
It is an imagery which is abstract, but conveys the unmistakable aura and feel of landscape. This is not so much a matter of form as it is of color and movement; his paintings establish a kind of esthetic parallel to the large motions of sky and cloud, to the sewwp of hills, to the glitter of sun and water.
Technically the artists control of his difficult method is extraordinary. What matters in the end, however, is the visual poetry which these paintings evoke.
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