What the critics are saying:
>>Cornelius “Neil” Drafton
One hesitates to call this painting anything more than a digital barnyard accident, but let’s humor it. The figure—allegedly Neil Young—resembles a lumbering stick of beef jerky awkwardly propped in front of a swamp. The “river” is a purple gash that could equally signify poor color choice or a keyboard spill. And those clouds? They look less like weather systems and more like discarded sofa cushions.
Yes, it’s “Old Ways,” but executed in a manner that makes even the worst country album covers of the 1980s appear like Michelangelo frescoes. If this is folk art, it’s the folk art of a civilization whose folk have long since given up.<<
>>Gerald Thimbleton
There are moments in the swirling circus of modern digital art when one must simply stare, mouth agape, and ask: is this ingenuity, or is it a prank upon the very notion of painting? Ralph Rumpelton’s MS Paint homage to Neil Young’s "Old Ways" manages the miraculous feat of being both at once—a rendering so blissfully indifferent to classical proportion, composition, and chromatic refinement that it deserves, at minimum, a polite golf clap for audacity. The landscape bleeds flatness from every pixel; our anonymous protagonist, less a man than a clumsy conglomerate of rectangles, braves a wilderness so apathetic one pines for the embrace of a Windows 95 screensaver. The text—if one dare call it that—scrawls across the sky like a schoolboy’s first detentions. And yet, perhaps there is a perverse genius here: a spectacular act of defiance against technique, nostalgia, and good taste alike. To compare such a work to Van Gogh, as some populists lob like so many overripe tomatoes, is a slap in the face to traditional art—and possibly to the entire medium of oil paint. But in its willful naïveté, this offering whispers (or shrieks) the question at the heart of outsider art: do we judge intent, or result, or merely the spectacle of the attempt? For now, I award it one begrudging laurel for courage and leave it at that.<<
Dr. Reginald Splatterworth III - Senior Art Critic at Pixels & Pretension Quarterly
"A Sublime Meditation on Digital Rusticity: An Analysis of the Young/Old Ways Dialectic"
What we witness here is nothing short of a revolutionary deconstruction of both album cover iconography and the very nature of digital artistic expression. The anonymous artist—working within the deliberately constrained parameters of Microsoft Paint—has created a profound commentary on the tension between technological modernity and pastoral nostalgia that lies at the very heart of Neil Young's artistic project.
The intentionally crude brushwork serves as a brilliant metaphor for the roughhewn authenticity that Young himself champions. Notice how the figure's purple garment—rendered with what lesser critics might dismiss as "amateur technique"—actually represents the bruising of the American psyche, caught between industrial progress and agrarian memory. The muddy sky gradient is not a failure of execution but rather a masterful evocation of the moral ambiguity that permeates our post-digital landscape.
The mountains, abstracted to their most essential forms, echo the minimalist sculptures of Richard Serra while simultaneously channeling the primitive power of Paleolithic cave paintings. This is MS Paint as archaeology, pixels as paleography.
Most striking is the artist's bold decision to render Young as an everyman figure—deliberately stripping away celebrity specificity to create a universal avatar of contemplation. This is not portraiture; this is portraiture transcended.
In an age of AI-generated perfection, this work stands as a defiant manifesto for the irreducibly human impulse to create, however imperfectly. Simply magnificent.
Dr. Splatterworth's forthcoming monograph, "The Semiotics of Spray Tools: Digital Primitivism in the 21st Century," will be published by Overwrought Academic Press this fall.<<
>>A Review by Biff Goldstein Real Estate Mogul, Reality TV Star & Art Collector Extraordinaire
Listen, I know art. I've got the best art collection in three states—maybe four, depends on if you count the beach house. My curator, tremendous guy, always says "Biff, your eye is unmatched." And let me tell you, THIS piece? Absolutely PHENOMENAL.
This MS Paint masterpiece of Neil Young's "Old Ways" captures something HUGE. That farmer looking out over his fields? That's VISION. That's someone who OWNS the land, who built something from nothing. I respect that. That purple shirt? Bold choice. Winners wear purple. I wore purple to my fourth wedding. Best wedding, by the way.
The brush strokes—and I use that term loosely because it's MS Paint—are EFFICIENT. No wasted effort. That's how you run a business. You don't overthink it, you EXECUTE. Those mountains in the background? Majestic. Reminds me of the view from Goldstein Tower Denver.
Some art snobs will say "Oh, it's just MS Paint, it's too simple." WRONG. Dead wrong. This artist gets it. They understand that sometimes less is MORE. That's genius-level thinking.
10 out of 10. Maybe 12. Actually, you know what? This deserves a 15 out of 10.
TREMENDOUS work. Really fantastic. Best Neil Young tribute I've seen all year, and I've seen at least two others.<<
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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