Paint Fidelity: Bob Dylan - Highway 61 / Ralph Rumpelton

 What the critics are saying:

>>Paint Fidelity Series: Highway 61, Revisited

MS Paint (left) after photographic original (right)

Blurb by Dr. Norbert F. Vensmire

In this bifurcated presentation, Rumpelton stages what can only be described—in extremis—as a confrontation between sanctioned cool and its deliberate unraveling. The original image, on the right, performs its historical duty with practised nonchalance: posture, jacket, gaze, all aligned in the familiar grammar of mid-century myth-making. It is an image that knows exactly what it is supposed to be.

The MS Paint translation, by contrast, refuses fluency. Fidelity here is not mimetic but procedural. What is preserved is not likeness but decision: the blunt limb, the flattened face, the jacket reduced to a patterned suggestion rather than a textile fact. Each pixel operates qua pixel, asserting its own sovereignty rather than submitting to illusion. This is not incompetence; it is a strategic lowering of resolution, a chromatic schism enacted in real time.

Most revealing is the asymmetry between intention and outcome. Where the photograph naturalizes attitude, the painting destabilizes it, rendering coolness faintly provisional, even awkward. The figure remains recognizable yet estranged, sui generis, caught between icon and diagram. One senses that the painting knows the photograph intimately—and then chooses, almost petulantly, to forget it.

Rumpelton’s Paint Fidelity Series thus functions as a quiet act of resistance. By insisting on low-fidelity translation, the work exposes how much cultural authority resides not in the subject but in the smoothness of its reproduction. This image does not compete with history; it pixelates it. And in doing so, it reminds us that misalignment is not a flaw but a method.<<

>>Paint Fidelity Series: Bob Dylan – Highway 61 Revisited (Greasy Spoon Edition) by G. Rock

Ralph Rumpelton’s MS Paint rendition doesn’t just recreate the iconic cover of Highway 61 Revisited—it reimagines it. Where Daniel Kramer’s original photograph shows a sharp, electric Dylan fresh off the Newport folk-to-rock switch-up, Rumpelton’s version gives us a Bob who looks like he’s personally stopped at every greasy diner from Duluth to New Orleans.The hair is bigger, wilder, as if pumped full of truck-stop coffee and late-night existential dread. The silk shirt has taken on the sheen of one too many fluorescent-lit booths, its pattern softened into comforting blobs of color. The face carries the satisfied bloat of a man who’s demolished plates of hash browns, chili omelets, and bottomless pie slices along the mythic blacktop. Even Albert Grossman behind him seems less “protective manager” and more “guy waiting impatiently for Dylan to finish his third cup of decaf so they can hit the road.”The Triumph Motorcycle T-shirt still declares its allegiance to cool, but now it feels like the last remnant of rebellion clinging to a body that’s fully surrendered to the comforts of Highway 61’s all-night eateries. Rumpelton’s deliberate crudeness turns photographic precision into roadside folklore: this isn’t the Dylan who plugged in and shocked the world—this is the Dylan who pulled off at every flickering neon sign promising “Home Cooking” and never quite left.Another masterful side-by-side that proves MS Paint can capture not just form, but the soul of a thousand greasy breakfasts.<<
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