{"id":392568,"date":"2026-04-22T19:16:20","date_gmt":"2026-04-22T19:16:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/392568\/"},"modified":"2026-04-22T19:16:20","modified_gmt":"2026-04-22T19:16:20","slug":"i-forgot-i-made-a-weird-painting-with-a-dead-comedian-and-a-citroen-2cv-in-it-about-20-years-ago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/392568\/","title":{"rendered":"I Forgot I Made A Weird Painting With A Dead Comedian And A Citro\u00ebn 2CV In It About 20 Years Ago"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just in case you may have thought my fixations with Citro\u00ebn 2CVs<\/a> 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\u2019s a painting I made, damn, about 20 years ago for a little art show in LA, and it\u2019s 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!<\/p>\n

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 Citro\u00ebn-including painting? We can also branch out into medieval art and Sam Kinison. It\u2019ll make sense.<\/p>\n

\"Vidframe<\/p>\n

\"Vidframe<\/p>\n

First, I guess I should show the whole painting, and give it a bit of explanation. I can\u2019t 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\u2019s the ghost of Sam Kinison warning a drunk driver:<\/p>\n

\"Cs<\/p>\n

Are you familiar with the whole annunciation painting concept? Basically, they\u2019re 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\u2019s been knocked up. And will have a child who will become the Christ! It\u2019s a pretty intense moment.<\/p>\n

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 \u2026 bored? For example, here\u2019s one from the 1200s:<\/p>\n

\"\"Source: Aix-en-Provence, Biblioth\u00e8que municipale<\/p>\n

Everyone is so\u00a0calm. Mary has her hand politely on her chest, all like \u201coh, me? The child of God is in my womb? How about that.\u201d\u00a0Even the angel\u2019s announcement scroll is laying there all flaccid.<\/p>\n

\"CsImage: Wikimedia Commons<\/p>\n

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\u2019s rendered in a much more naturalistic style (though the perspective is still medieval-wonky), but everyone is equally and strangely expressionless.<\/p>\n

Also, note that these annunciation paintings are all anachronistic in setting; there\u2019s no attempt to make the annunciation scene look like it took place when it did, sometime just around nine months prior to, let\u2019s see, zero BCE. The clothes and interiors and objects just look like whatever was around when the painter was around. It\u2019d 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\u2019re gonna be a mom.<\/p>\n

\"\"Image: Paris, Biblioth\u00e8que Mazarine, MS 469<\/p>\n

There\u2019s another scroll-text balloon!<\/p>\n

So, I can\u2019t remember exactly\u00a0why\u00a0I wanted to do some interpretation of an annunciation painting, and I can\u2019t 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?<\/p>\n

I do know I wanted to try and mimic the crude medieval sort of look and feel, like illuminated-manuscript-style. There\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\"Cs<\/p>\n

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\u2019t read\u00a0Porcinelatin,\u00a0that caption,\u00a0\u201cethay ohstgay ofay SAM KINISON arningway ethay unkdray iverdray\u201d translates to \u201cthe ghost of Sam Kinison warning the drunk driver.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Cs<\/p>\n

Why did I pick Sam Kinison? I mean, he was killed by a drunk driver, so there\u2019s that. And he had a background as a preacher, so there\u2019s the sort of religious element. In case you don\u2019t remember him, he was a very shouty comedian who had a surge of popularity in the early 1980s. Here\u2019s a clip of him from his appearance in Rodney Dangerfield\u2019s 1986 banger of a movie,\u00a0Back to School:<\/p>\n

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\u2019t particularly funny, really, and he was just kind of a, well, dick.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t feel especially funny. I guess at the time we laughed from the shock value, but beyond that? I\u2019m not sure. There are comics who can back up being a dick by being really fucking funny, I\u2019m just not sure Kinison ever quite got there.<\/p>\n

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\u2019m 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\u2019d probably reconsider all sorts of decisions.<\/p>\n

\"Cs<\/p>\n

As far as my rendering of the 2CV goes, I think I chubbied it up a little too much. And those tires are\u00a0way 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.<\/p>\n

But still, I was going for a sort of stilted, monk-in-an-abbey kind of stylized look, and I think it has that?<\/p>\n

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 Citro\u00ebns on cut wood just weren\u2019t what the market wanted back then?<\/p>\n

Top graphic image: Jason Torchinsky, obviously<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Just in case you may have thought my fixations with Citro\u00ebn 2CVs was a recent affectation, I promise…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":392569,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[4734,202853,442,498,499,500,18570,142522,501,156,111,139,69,3074,202854,202855],"class_list":{"0":"post-392568","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-angel","9":"tag-annunciation","10":"tag-arts","11":"tag-arts-and-design","12":"tag-artsanddesign","13":"tag-artsdesign","14":"tag-citroen","15":"tag-cold-start","16":"tag-design","17":"tag-entertainment","18":"tag-new-zealand","19":"tag-newzealand","20":"tag-nz","21":"tag-painting","22":"tag-pig-latin","23":"tag-virgin-mary"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392568","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=392568"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392568\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/392569"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=392568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=392568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=392568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}