The bold first collection of watercolors on paper and wood by Los Angeles artist Jon Huck (born 1961), At the Drop of a Hat portrays a wild tableau of misfits and weirdos caught in a panoply of odd scenarios and ambivalent moods. There are masks, costumes, recurring props and motifs, and a pervasive ambiguity between human and beast. A gleefully deranged comedy animates these bright surfaces—a sense of spontaneous mischief and delight in the brush strokes and blurred paints—but also a longing within the characters themselves, hints of dark melancholy and unsettling private narratives. With a self-taught experimental style both unrestrained and delicately precise, Huck is a nuanced observer of gesture, posture and facial expression, of the personae that conceal us and the flaws that make us real.
