A first collection of Los Angeles artist Jon Huck’s hauntingly beautiful watercolor paintings on paper and wood

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.