Just in case you thought my love for the Citroën 2CV was a recent thing, I promise that’s not the case. And I noticed that there’s a bit of visual evidence to support this. In paint format! And a kind of ridiculous, medieval style painting style! This is a painting I made for a small art show in Los Angeles about 20 years ago, and it hangs in my basement. I had completely forgotten about it until I saw it the other day, but then I realized I had painted a 2CV on it.
So, since I have to do a cold start on a weekday morning until the sun goes out and I have to light the moon, I thought it might be okay to talk about this strange picture involving a Citroen. Try branching out into medieval art and Sam Kinison. That makes sense.
I think it would be better to show you the whole picture first and explain it a little. I can’t remember the theme of the show, but for some reason I decided I wanted to imitate the form of medieval herald paintings. Only in this case, instead of an angel announcing the birth of Christ to Mary, the ghost of Sam Kinison is warning drunk drivers.
Do you know the whole concept of Annunciation paintings? Basically they are paintings (illustrations or whatever) depicting the moment when the Angel Gabriel, like the Virgin Mary, travels to Earth to let Mary know that he has been overwhelmed by the incredible. And she will give birth to a child who will become Christ! It’s a pretty intense moment.
Nevertheless, in many paintings and drawings from around 1100 to 1400, for example, the people taking part in this incredibly important moment always look very bored. For example, from the 1200s:
Everyone is like that Calm. Mary politely puts her hand on her chest.Oh, me? Is there a child of God in my womb? How about that? ” Even the scroll of angelic prophecies lies there limply.
Speaking of scrolls, I like how sometimes the scrolls become a kind of floating proto-speech bubble. This is what I recreated in my ridiculous painting. The picture above was painted around 1500 by an anonymous artist in Silesia (a region around southwestern Poland that includes parts of Germany and the Czech Republic) and features a scroll like this speech bubble. Although drawn in a more naturalistic style (although the perspective is still medieval), everyone is equally and oddly expressionless.
Also note that all of these Annunciation paintings are in anachronistic settings. There is no attempt at all to make the Annunciation scene appear as if it happened sometime just nine months ago, 0 BC. Clothes, interiors, and objects look exactly like they did in the artist’s time. Now, it would be like if Mary, dressed in athleisure, scrolled through her iPhone outside a Starbucks as the angel Gabriel pulled into his Toyota RAV4, and there was a picture of an oracle announcing, “You’re going to be a mom.”
There’s another scrolling text balloon.
So I don’t remember exactly, but why I wanted to interpret a certain notice picture, but I can’t remember why I translated it into the ghost of Sam Kinison, who was killed by a drunk driver and warned 2CV owners not to drink and drive. Maybe it has something to do with the theme of the show?
Yes, I understand that you wanted to emulate the rough medieval look and feel of an illuminated manuscript. The look of faces and hands, the stylization of trees and plants, decorative border elements, it’s all there. For some reason I wanted to play with them all.
I wanted to include captions to give it the feel of an illuminated manuscript, and while Latin would be ideal, I thought Pig Latin would be more interesting. If you can’t read porcineratin, That caption, “Esei Ostgey Ofai Sam Kinnison Earningway Esei Andrei Iverdrei” Translated as “”Sam Kinison’s ghost warns drunk drivers”
Why did you choose Sam Kinison? I mean, he was killed by a drunk driver, so there you have it. He also has a background as a preacher, so there’s a certain religious element to it as well. For those of you who don’t remember him, he was a very loud comedian whose popularity skyrocketed in the early 1980s. Here’s a clip of him when he appeared in Rodney Dangerfield’s 1986 film Banger. back to school:
Kinnison was known above all for his raw, wild cries. To be honest, I didn’t think he was that good as a comic. He definitely has stage presence and a strong hook and passion, which is great, but his jokes themselves weren’t particularly funny.
Being an idiot is definitely an effective way to become a cartoonist, but in hindsight, I’m pretty sure he was joking when I saw his writing about, say, starving people. above I just don’t find it particularly interesting. I think I laughed at the shocking content at the time, but more than that? I don’t really understand. There are comics out there that can make up for being shitty by being really funny, but I’m not sure Kinison could have gotten that far.
Either way, his death was still tragic, of course, but somehow he seemed like a good angelic agent to get people to stop drinking and driving. If Sam Kinnison showed up, hovering six feet off the ground, yelling at me to drop my keys while I was drunk and fumbling with them, I’d probably reconsider all kinds of decisions.
As far as the 2CV rendering goes, I think I made it a little too fat. And the tires are method It’s thick for a 2CV. I think my habit of drawing beetles is also kind of obvious there, since they have more beetle-like proportions.
Still, I was going for a kind of formal, monastic monk-like, stylized look, and I think that’s fine, right?
All these years later, I still have this painting, and as you can probably imagine, no one bought it at the exhibition. Maybe the old-fashioned paintings of dead comedians and Citroëns on cut-out pieces of wood weren’t what the market wanted at the time?
Top graphic image: Obviously Jason Torchinski
#forgot #years #drew #strange #picture #deceased #comedian #Citroen #2CV #Autopian