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
Scene: ANTIQUES ROADSHOW – Charlotte, NC
[Appraiser examines the piece, turning it over carefully]
“Well, this is quite something. What we have here is a mixed-media panel painting, acrylic on wood, it appears executed in a deliberately archaizing style. The artist, signed here as ‘Torch,’ has done something genuinely clever. This is a modern annunciation painting, a genre with roots going back to the 13th century, but rendered in a thoroughly contemporary vernacular.
The iconographic program is immediately legible to anyone familiar with the tradition, your angelic messenger descending in divine light, your scroll-as-speech-balloon, your decorative border work mimicking manuscript illumination. Technically, the artist has done their homework. The stylized trees, the flattened perspective, the stiff expressionless faces, that’s not incompetence, that’s intentional medievalism.
Now, the twist, and this is where it gets fun, the Angel Gabriel has been replaced by the ghost of comedian Sam Kinison, who was tragically killed by a drunk driver in 1992, warning a man beside a Citroën 2CV not to drive drunk. The caption is rendered in Pig Latin rather than Church Latin, which I think shows a real wit.
Is it worth anything? In the current folk art and outsider art market, a piece this conceptually layered and technically accomplished – honestly, I’d put this somewhere between $800 and $1,400. But I suspect you’re not selling it.”
Bravo. I appreciate it when the comment section turns to fan fiction.
GOLD
So much potential for more of these… Bill Hicks warning me not to smoke, Mitch Hedberg telling me I should do drugs even though he still does them in heaven, Andy Kaufman telling me something he totally made up to get me to stop doing something I should still be able to do, Ralphie May telling me to watch my diet, Milton Berle telling me not to get old…
None of that beats the horror of Vincent Price just showing up out of nowhere, pointing at you, and laughing his laugh from the end of Thriller.
Speaking of 2CVs and dead comedians, my mother told me once that she nearly ran over Jimmy Durante in her 2CV back in the day.
Is that how he…kicked the bucket?
I dunno, Jason, I’m seeing Randall Graves.
Occurs to me that the thing about the dick school of comedy is that, most of the time, the dickers is so scattershot that it eventually hits a target that you dislike, so you laugh along in a way that brings you into the act.
I remember Sam Kinison being a fairly big thing, and every time I saw him on whatever TV show I couldn’t understand why.
At around the same time period was Steven Wright, who did left-field crooked but deadpan observational comedy, who I thought was hilarious.
I remember Sam Kinison and his version of Wild Thing in his inimitable style.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wAm2HAx7i0
Didn’t Michelangelo also have a mechanical aptitude?
This may be the most Torch thing that has ever happened.
Always so much forehead in those paintings.
When that’s the only skin you’re allowed to show…
Followed by Renaissance, when everyone forgot what clothing was and were nekkid but for a few wisps of cloth that were floating mysteriously in just the right places…
The painting was likely inspired by the DMT trip that Torch took just an hour before deciding to paint it. He was torn by painting machine elves or Sam Kinison. The screamer won out.
Here’s a vote for Torch to redo the painting, with a machine elf Kinison, and his psychic horror homonculus car.
I’m impressed! Confused, but impressed!
I saw Sam in concert about 6 months before he died. Had a cassette or two, I forget. At the time I remember laughing. Guess I grew up.
(And he joked about drunk driving not being a big deal, karma can be a bitch.)
Caught him in concert in ’88 at University of Florida. I was “out-of-body-experience” stoned with a bunch of friends and don’t honestly remember much about it other than the bit he used to do with the phone.
This absolutely belongs in a MOBA exposition.
I’m sure when the Sam Kinison revival (not literally, I hope) eventually happens and everyone starts wearing berets and screaming at each other, your painting will become a priceless artifact. Heck, we’re already screaming at each other, can berets be far behind?
Didn’t Kevin James attempt to bring back the beret, without the screaming?
Yeah, doesn’t work without the screaming … or ever for Kevin James.
I’m loving your obsession with 2CV’s! As a Citroen enthusiast and former GSA, CX, ZX owner I like to read about these extremely unusual and well engineered cars. I would like to request that you do some investigative journalism into the myth of Emile Leray who allegedly cut up his disabled Citroën 2CV into a makeshift motorcycle to escape the Moroccan Sahara. What I find so odd about this story is he was only 20 miles from town and it took 12 days to build the motorcycle. He could have walked in a mater of hours to go get help. Does nobody else find this strange?
I’ve heard that was actually a hoax, but it’s worth looking into!
If being hit by a drunk driver is on the schedule, then I’ll take my chances with a 2CV.
“I guess archaic-looking paintings of floating dead comedians and Citroëns on cut wood just weren’t what the market wanted back then?”
Do you want a bidding war in the comments? Because that’s how you get a bidding war in the comments.
$10.
I mean, if the offer is right…
Just don’t ship it to Michigan first.
one quadrillion femto pico bitcoin!
$11
$9.50
I’m still in trouble for the last bidding war I got into, but $15.
I’ll give you $17.90 and throw in a spider ring that came on a cupcake
$19.50 and the stray bump-stop that took out my AC condenser on I-95 in Baltimore.
I have a small gallery of bizarre art I’ve found at thrift and antique stores over the years. This would fit proudly in between the expressionistic painting of a woman with a large afro dancing on what appears to be a burning city and the truly batshit surrealist canvas I rescued from a Goodwill featuring, among other things, Father Time, some rainbow-colored aliens and a naked man in a trucker cap hugging what is either a female form or a giant penis.
$25.00.
Torch, you are a national and global treasure. Never change.