Just in case you may have thought my fixations with Citroën 2CVs was a recent affectation, I promise you this is not the case, and I realized I had a bit of visual evidence to back this up. In painting form! And, sort of silly, faux-midieval painting form! It’s a painting I made, damn, about 20 years ago for a little art show in LA, and it’s been hanging in my basement. I kind of forgot about it until it caught my eye the other day and I realized oh yeah, I painted a 2CV in this thing!
So, since I need a Cold Start every single weekday morning until the sun finally fizzles out and we have to set the moon on fire, I figured why not talk about this weird Citroën-including painting? We can also branch out into medieval art and Sam Kinison. It’ll make sense.
First, I guess I should show the whole painting, and give it a bit of explanation. I can’t remember the theme of the show, but for whatever reason I decided I wanted to mimic the form of a middle-ages annunciation painting, only in this case, instead of an angel announcing the birth of Christ to Mary, it’s the ghost of Sam Kinison warning a drunk driver:
Are you familiar with the whole annunciation painting concept? Basically, they’re paintings (or illustrations or whatever) that show the moment when the angel Gabriel takes a business trip down to Earth to let Mary, as in the Virgin, know that, incredibly, she’s been knocked up. And will have a child who will become the Christ! It’s a pretty intense moment.
And yet, in a lot of these paintings and drawings from between, say, 1100 and 1400 or so, the participants in this incredibly important moment always look so … bored? For example, here’s one from the 1200s:
Everyone is so calm. Mary has her hand politely on her chest, all like “oh, me? The child of God is in my womb? How about that.” Even the angel’s announcement scroll is laying there all flaccid.
Speaking of scrolls, I do like how sometimes the scroll becomes a sort of floating proto-speech balloon, something I replicated in my silly painting. The painting above, from Silesia (an area around Southwestern Poland, with bits of Germany and the Czech Republic), from an anonymous painter around 1500, uses this scroll-as-speech balloon thing. It’s rendered in a much more naturalistic style (though the perspective is still medieval-wonky), but everyone is equally and strangely expressionless.
Also, note that these annunciation paintings are all anachronistic in setting; there’s no attempt to make the annunciation scene look like it took place when it did, sometime just around nine months prior to, let’s see, zero BCE. The clothes and interiors and objects just look like whatever was around when the painter was around. It’d be like if there was an annunciation painting now that showed Mary wearing athlesiure, scrolling on her iPhone outside a Starbucks as the Angel Gabriel rolls up in a Toyota RAV4 to let her know that, hey, you’re gonna be a mom.
There’s another scroll-text balloon!
So, I can’t remember exactly why I wanted to do some interpretation of an annunciation painting, and I can’t remember why I decided to translate it into the ghost of Sam Kinison, who was killed by a drunk driver, warning some 2CV owner not to drive drunk themselves? Maybe it had something to do with the theme of the show?
I do know I wanted to try and mimic the crude medieval sort of look and feel, like illuminated-manuscript-style. There’s a certain way faces and hands looked, the way trees and plant life would get stylized, the decorative border elements, all that. I wanted to play with all that, for some reason.
I wanted to include a caption to make it have that illuminated manuscript-ish feeling, and while Latin would be ideal, I thought Pig Latin would be funnier. In case you can’t read Porcinelatin, that caption, “ethay ohstgay ofay SAM KINISON arningway ethay unkdray iverdray” translates to “the ghost of Sam Kinison warning the drunk driver.”
Why did I pick Sam Kinison? I mean, he was killed by a drunk driver, so there’s that. And he had a background as a preacher, so there’s the sort of religious element. In case you don’t remember him, he was a very shouty comedian who had a surge of popularity in the early 1980s. Here’s a clip of him from his appearance in Rodney Dangerfield’s 1986 banger of a movie, Back to School:
Kinison was known for that raw, feral screaming more than anything else. Honestly, I never thought he was all that good as a comic; he absolutely had stage presence and a powerful hook and passion, which is great, but his jokes themselves weren’t particularly funny, really, and he was just kind of a, well, dick.
Being a dick is absolutely an effective way to be a comic, but in hindsight, looking at some of his bits about starving people, for example, and making the joke on them just doesn’t feel especially funny. I guess at the time we laughed from the shock value, but beyond that? I’m not sure. There are comics who can back up being a dick by being really fucking funny, I’m just not sure Kinison ever quite got there.
Anyway, his death was still tragic, of course, and for some reason he seemed like a good angelic agent to get people to not drink and drive. I’m sure if Sam Kinison appeared, hovering six feet off the ground, screaming at me to drop the keys while I drunkenly fumbled with the lock, I’d probably reconsider all sorts of decisions.
As far as my rendering of the 2CV goes, I think I chubbied it up a little too much. And those tires are way too chonky for a 2CV. I think my Beetle-drawing habits are also kind of evident there, as it has sort of more Beetle-like proportions.
But still, I was going for a sort of stilted, monk-in-an-abbey kind of stylized look, and I think it has that?
No one bought the painting at the show, as you probably guessed, seeing as how I still have it after all these years. I guess archaic-looking paintings of floating dead comedians and Citroëns on cut wood just weren’t what the market wanted back then?
Top graphic image: Jason Torchinsky, obviously
The post I Forgot I Made A Weird Painting With A Dead Comedian And A Citroën 2CV In It About 20 Years Ago appeared first on The Autopian.