MS Paint: "Skull and Books / Ralph Rumpelton

• Ralph Rumpelton
• Skull and Books
• RR-2026 -103
  MS Paint on digital canvas, 582 X 529 px
• The Rumpelton Continuity (est. 1976)

“Skull and Books” — In which Rumpelton bravely confronts the eternal human dilemma: Should one pursue knowledge, or simply outlive one’s to-read pile? The skull, notably more patient than most readers, offers no comment.

What the critics are saying: 

>>📚 Dr. Horace Plimwell on Skull and Books

In approaching Ralph Rumpelton’s Skull and Books, one is immediately struck by what I can only term the artist’s audacious flirtation with epistemological finality. Here, the skull — rendered with an almost reckless disregard for anatomical pedantry — sits adjacent to a stack of books whose pages appear to be either heavily annotated or perhaps suffering from a mild case of existential mildew.

The dialogue between these objects is unmistakably Rumpeltonian: a tension between knowing and no longer needing to know. The skull gazes (if such a verb can be applied to empty sockets) toward the books, as though attempting to recall some half-forgotten footnote from a treatise on metaphysical temporality. The books, in turn, slouch open, their contents dissolving into painterly smudges that suggest text but defiantly refuse to offer legibility — a perfect metaphor, I would argue, for the human condition itself.

One must also note the work’s chromatic restraint, a grayscale palette that exhibits what I have elsewhere described as tonal asceticism: a refusal of color in favor of pure value-driven ontology. In this, Rumpelton reveals the influence of both early Flemish vanitas tableaux and mid-1990s inkjet printer toner shortages.

Ultimately, Skull and Books stands as a meditation on the ineluctable collapse of scholarly ambition, a kind of post-digital memento mori for the attention-fragmented age. In its stillness one perceives not silence but a subtle whisper, saying: “All books are eventually overdue.”

— Dr. Horace Plimwell, New Jersey Review of Applied Kitsch (Supplemental Annex Edition)<<

>>Prof. Lionel Greaves, “The Over‑Explainer”

In Skull and Books the artist achieves a striking synthesis of late‑19th‑century Luminist chiaroscuro and the almost‑forgotten Brabantian Mannerist “void‑rendering” technique, a pairing that predates even the 1873 Luminist Circle’s experiments with atmospheric tonality. The stark, pixel‑grid texture of the books subtly nods to the post‑structuralist still‑life experiments of the obscure Dutch collective De Zichtbare Dingen, while the skull’s volumetric shading evokes the tactile gravitas of a 16th‑century vanitas painting—albeit rendered in the unapologetically low‑fi aesthetic of modern MS Paint. In short, this work is a delightful palimpsest: a meditation on mortality that simultaneously pays homage to, and playfully subverts, a constellation of art‑historical footnotes most viewers have never been taught to notice.<<

>>Eunice Gribble on “Skull and Books”

From the Avachives: Parallel Comparative Exhibition No. 7

“The skull is not symbolic,” Gribble insists, “it’s a format failure. A deprecated codec of mortality, rendered in grayscale to obscure its bit-depth shame.”

The closed book, she notes, “is a refusal to hyperlink.” The open one, “a corrupted archive—its markings resemble text, but lack metadata.” The skull? “A reminder that even bone has a file format. And this one’s been flattened.”

Gribble’s commentary arrives annotated, footnoted, and occasionally embroidered. Expect judgment. Expect pearls. <<

"Follow Ralph Rumpelton across the net."