Tom Huck got the inspiration for his work in a flood of blood. He fell in love with printmaking as an undergrad at Southern Illinois University, but by his second year of grad school at Washington University in Saint Louis he’d hit a wall. “I would go to my studio and just sit there, because I didn’t know what I wanted to say.” Huck had been making woodcuts similar to the drawings he’d done earlier, photo-realist renditions of collaged family photos, but at this point was arguing with his instructors and had been put on probation because he wasn’t producing any work. Then he spent Thanksgiving of 1994 in his hometown of Potosi, Missouri.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Huck’s grotesque woodcuts at Aron Packer, whose style is influenced both by Albrecht Durer and underground comics, have their roots in an incident then. Two younger brothers who’d been deer hunting unsuccessfully for four or five years finally killed a deer–by accident, while driving. After years of getting ribbed about their failure, they let their father believe they’d shot it. But an animal hit by a car suffers massive internal bleeding, and when their father cut it open, “It dumped a bucket of blood on him, like projectile vomiting,” Huck says. They were all shocked, and Huck laughed. “I like dark humor–Pulp Fiction was a huge influence on me. I thought, ‘My God, this is everything that means anything to me–my family history, rural humor. I’m going to draw this.” He’s been mining Potosi for his content ever since. Among the early drawings he did was one called Boar’s Head Boogie of a boxing ring for kids that local bar patrons set up, where they bet on the youngsters “beating the crap out of each other.”
Another Bloody Bucket story was that the bar served beef brains buffet style before its square dances, and Huck had also heard of hunters “popping the tops off the heads of squirrels and eating the brains raw.” In Beef Brain Buffet, a man and woman hugging a smiling boy feed him brains out of a grinning skull with horns. The Jolly Guano Bros Ride Again, based on another story, depicts two bank robbers wearing cow pelvises as masks escaping on a bicycle. For the “broom dances” at the Bloody Bucket, “losers” who couldn’t find a dance partner were offered brooms with human features sewn on, a scene shown in Possum Promenade. Another work, Dollar Dance, comes from a scene Huck actually witnessed at a wedding reception, when a drunken bride eight months pregnant danced on the tables for spare change. “I thought, this is probably what it was like at the Bloody Bucket,” he says.
Info: 312-226-8984
