The Guardian (UK)
“The Storm That Never Came is a deadpan masterpiece of digital mythmaking. Holyoke’s lens treats Rumpelton with both reverence and disbelief, capturing a man who paints with the precision of a saint and the confusion of a man still searching for the ‘save as’ button. What begins as a portrait of eccentricity becomes a meditation on faith — in pixels, in process, in persistence.” ★★★★☆
Variety
“Part character study, part cultural autopsy, Holyoke’s film finds strange poetry in pixelation. Rumpelton’s MS Paint canvases—crude, clumsy, defiant—become mirrors for a generation that forgot how to draw but never stopped pretending. A documentary that manages to laugh without ever letting you off the hook.”
Artforum
“Holyoke’s Rumpelton is both artifact and apparition. Every frame hums with the tension between parody and prayer. Watching him drag a mouse across the screen feels less like digital labor than ritual purification. This is outsider art as theology.”
Rolling Stone
“Rumpelton turns limitation into liberation. The film plays like Searching for Sugar Man with fewer guitars and more beige screens. By the end, you start to believe that maybe MS Paint really was the last honest art tool.”
Sebastian Puff Draganov, in The Vienna Quarterly Review
“Holyoke captures Rumpelton’s haunted humor—the kind that sweats through the pixels. It’s not a portrait; it’s a séance. We emerge unsure whether Rumpelton ever existed, or if we merely imagined him to feel less alone in our own mediocrity.”
Dale of the Brook (transcribed from a wet napkin)
“This film is a damp sermon. I watched it underwater and it held up. It rinses the eyes. I give it four suds and a ripple.”
Follow Rumpelton across the multiverse:
Ralph Rumpelton “Painting What the Earth Can’t Comprehend” - Ralph Rumpelton User Profile DeviantArt - Ralph Rumpelton Substack - Instagram
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