This Just In

Just got this in an email from Ralph Rumpelton. No warning, no buildup — just the image. First time he’s ever sent in something mid-process. Usually what shows up is fully Rumpeltized and beyond explanation.

This feels different. Stripped down. Almost clinical.

You can see the reduction happening — the face pared back to essentials, the black field swallowing everything unnecessary. It’s like watching him decide what stays and what gets sacrificed. The lines are tentative but deliberate. The expression is already there, hovering between caricature and intensity.

What struck me most is the restraint. No clutter. No background narrative. Just the head, the collar, the void. It’s a rare glimpse into that moment before exaggeration tips into distortion.

I don’t know if this is the beginning of something or a fragment of something already abandoned. With Ralph, it’s hard to tell. But it’s the first time he’s ever pulled back the curtain even slightly.

Paint Fidelity: Brand X - Moroccan Roll / Rumpelton

 What the critics are saying:

>>Pixel Marx on the Paint Fidelity Series: Brand X – Moroccan Roll

There’s something beautifully defiant about attempting to “faithfully” recreate the hyper-clean surrealism of Moroccan Roll using the blunt-force instrument of MS Paint. The original cover—designed by Hipgnosis for Brand X—is all sun-bleached geometry and conceptual precision: a man in a suit framed inside a golden diagram, North African architecture stretching into an existential vanishing point. It’s prog-fusion minimalism with a side of metaphysical espionage.

But the Paint Fidelity version doesn’t chase precision. It chases memory.

Where the original speaks in sharp edges and calibrated color fields, the MS Paint translation melts the scene into sandstorm abstraction. The yellows become dust. The architecture dissolves into suggestion. The targeting circle—so exact and ominous in the Hipgnosis original—evaporates entirely, replaced by atmosphere. And in that erasure, something radical happens: the concept shifts from surveillance to solitude.

The suited figure on the left is less an agent in a design scheme and more a pilgrim in beige. The hat is chunkier. The body is block-built. The face is a whisper. The whole thing feels like it’s been remembered after thirty years of listening to fusion records in a dim room. It’s not about graphic authority; it’s about tonal loyalty.

That’s what makes this series interesting. Paint Fidelity isn’t about duplication—it’s about translation across tools that resist polish. MS Paint doesn’t do gradated cool; it does stubborn, human approximations. The left image leans into that constraint. It says: “I know the original. I love the original. But I’m going to re-hear it in pixels.”

And honestly? That’s very on-brand for a record like Moroccan Roll. Jazz-fusion was always about bending structure without abandoning it. This version bends the cover the same way the band bent genre—loosely, imperfectly, but with conviction.

Low resolution. High devotion.<<

>>Marta Vellum

¹ Morrocan Roll (Brand X, 1977), cover art depicting a suited figure, back-turned, surveying what one can only describe as a colonial picturesque — here rendered by Rumpelton in MS Paint, a medium whose limitations are, in this critic's view, not limitations at all but rather a kind of epistemological honesty the original photograph-sourced illustration never had the courage to confess.²

² Though "courage" may be the wrong word. See footnote 8, which I have not yet written but intend to disavow.³

³ The hat. The hat. Rumpelton's hat is rounder, softer, more committed to its own hatness than the original, which sits atop its figure with the confidence of a prop. The Rumpelton hat believes in itself. This is not a small thing.⁴

⁴ It may, in fact, be the entire thing. I reserve judgment. See footnote 4a.

⁴ᵃ I do not reserve judgment. The hat is the entire thing.

⁵ The color palette warrants excavation. Where the original drowns in teal saturation and the ghastly yellow geometry of an analyst who has confused "sacred proportions" with "having a compass,"⁵ᵃ the Rumpelton iteration breathes — sandy, muted, humble before its own desert. The earth here is not scenery. It is opinion.

⁵ᵃ The yellow overlay on the original (visible in the comparative image provided) appears to be some manner of compositional annotation, possibly applied posthumously by a well-meaning archivist or a poorly-meaning one. Marta Vellum has feelings about archivist interventions. These feelings are documented elsewhere and are largely unresolved.⁵ᵇ

⁵ᵇ See: Vellum, M. "On the Annotated Object and Its Annotator's Hubris." Rumpelton Institute Quarterly, Vol. 3, never published, possibly fictional, definitely felt.

⁶ There is a moment in every Paint Fidelity piece — and Rumpelton is, among our current practitioners, the most serious student of this discipline⁶ᵃ — where the hand's imprecision ceases to be error and becomes interpretation. The blurred edges of the background architecture here do not represent sloppiness. They represent the honest admission that context is always slightly out of focus. The original does not admit this. The original pretends to know where the walls are.

⁶ᵃ A claim I make without citation because some truths need no footnote, and also because I am saving footnote 47 for a retraction.

⁷ In summary⁷ᵃ: Rumpelton has done what the finest archival copyists do — not reproduced the artifact, but argued with it, gently, in a medium that leaves every brushstroke visible as a decision. The figure stands. The desert receives him. The hat believes. This is sufficient.⁷ᵇ

⁷ᵃ I do not summarize. This is not a summary. This is a footnote that has achieved the silhouette of a summary without any of its structural commitments.

⁷ᵇ This is the compliment. You may have been waiting for it. It was always here.

---

— M. Vellum, Archival Division, Rumpelton Institute. All footnotes are subject to further footnoting. The main paragraph remains, as ever, forthcoming.<<

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MS Paint: House with Uncooperative Geometry / Ralph Rumpelton

• Ralph Rumpelton
•  RR-2020 - 018
• MS Paint on digital canvas, 658 X 584 px
• The Rumpelton Continuity (est. 1976)
• 
  
• House with Uncooperative Geometry (MS Paint, n.d.)
  This intimate grayscale study confronts the viewer with a dwelling that refuses to behave. Doors lean outward in a posture of quiet protest, windows slope as though exhausted by decades of seeing too much, and the chimney exhales a single sigh of smoke—evidence that the house is still trying, despite itself. The artist renders the winter atmosphere not as coldness but as an accumulating shrug: the sky is gray, the trees are gray, the very idea of structural integrity is gray. Yet the composition hums with life. This isn’t a ruin; it’s a house in mid-conversation, pausing only long enough to let us imagine what it might say next.
• What the critics are saying:
• >>SEBASTIAN PUFF DRAGANOV

  In this work—an MS Paint vignette that mimics the melancholic lyricism of rural memory—Rumpelton stages a confrontation between domestic architecture and the failures of narrative coherence. The house, rendered with a stubborn crookedness, becomes a diagram of lived experience: nothing holds perfectly, everything leans, and yet the structure persists.

  What fascinates me is the presence of Rumpelton's beloved imagined interlocutor: the invisible guest whose arrival the house anticipates but cannot quite prepare for. The open door hangs ajar like a question. The bent windows peer outward as if awaiting a signal. Even the smoke, tapering into the sky, reads as a message dispatched to no one in particular.

  Within Eastern European visual culture, such homes—part refuge, part confession—often carry the burden of collective uncertainty. Here, that sensibility is refracted through the vernacular awkwardness of MS Paint, producing a hybrid object that is both parody and prophecy. The result is a dwelling that feels at once abandoned and expectant, a space where solitude is not the absence of others but the echo of their imagined presence.

  It is precisely this tension, this seriousness wrapped in unserious means, that marks the work as a quietly significant contribution to outsider digital practice.<<

• >>"MS Paint: House with Uncooperative Geometry" - A Review by Reginald Thornberry III

  Good God.

  I've stared into the abyss of mediocrity for forty years, but this... this digital finger-painting masquerading as "art" represents a new nadir. The artist—and I use that term with the same generosity one might describe a child's macaroni necklace as "jewelry"—has apparently discovered Microsoft's most primitive drawing program and decided this constituted adequate preparation for inflicting their "vision" upon the world.

  The so-called "uncooperative geometry" isn't a stylistic choice; it's architectural incompetence rendered in grayscale. This house wouldn't pass a building inspection in any dimension, Euclidean or otherwise. The perspective doesn't merely fail—it actively insults Brunelleschi's corpse. That striped awning appears to have been drawn by someone who learned about patterns from a fever dream, and those trees suggest the artist has only encountered vegetation through hearsay.

  MS Paint. MS Paint. Even the medium is an admission of defeat. It's the digital equivalent of sculpting with cafeteria mashed potatoes. One doesn't choose MS Paint; one surrenders to it after every other option has rightfully rejected them.

  The only mercy here is that the monochromatic palette spares us from what would undoubtedly be an assault of garish colors. Small consolations for large failures.

  Rating: ½ star (the half-star is for managing to sign it)

  —R. Thornberry III "Your feelings are irrelevant; only my expertise matters"<<

Album Review - Mingus Ah Um

                                        THE SNINT REPORT

by Marjorie Snint

Mingus Ah Um – Charles Mingus (1959)

When Mingus Ah Um was released on Columbia Records in 1959, it arrived in a year already swollen with canonical jazz statements. Yet unlike the cool poise of Kind of Blue or the spiritual architecture of Giant Steps, Mingus offered something more volatile: a record that feels alive, argumentative, tender, and faintly dangerous all at once.

This is not a “bassist’s album.” It’s a composer’s manifesto.

The Sound of Organized Chaos

The opening track, “Better Git It in Your Soul,” is part gospel revival, part back-alley stomp. Handclaps, hollers, and shifting rhythms create a communal feeling that’s closer to church than club. Mingus doesn’t smooth out the edges—he sharpens them. Tempos lurch forward; ensembles swell and contract. The music breathes like a living organism.

“Goodbye Pork Pie Hat,” written for Lester Young, is one of jazz’s most haunting elegies. It floats rather than swings, built on subtle harmonic movement and aching restraint. Where Mingus can be volcanic, here he is heartbreakingly spare.

“Fables of Faubus” (in its original instrumental form on this album) hints at the political fury Mingus would later voice more explicitly. The arrangement snarls even without lyrics. It’s satire with teeth.

Composition Over Soloing

What distinguishes Mingus Ah Um is its architecture. Mingus writes for personalities. The horns don’t just solo—they converse, clash, provoke. Themes recur in fractured forms. Collective improvisation feels rehearsed yet volatile.

The album blends Ellingtonian grandeur with hard bop grit, gospel shouts, blues lament, and flashes of avant-garde freedom. Mingus absorbed the entire tradition and then stressed it until it creaked.

Why It Endures

Many jazz classics feel pristine, preserved behind glass. Mingus Ah Um feels human. Messy. Emotional. It swings hard, but it also argues. It mourns. It testifies.

If Kind of Blue is cool detachment and Giant Steps is harmonic ambition, Mingus Ah Um is moral and emotional urgency. It’s jazz as autobiography—defiant, contradictory, deeply American.

Verdict: Essential. Not just as a landmark of 1959, but as one of the clearest statements of what large-ensemble modern jazz could be: structured freedom, righteous anger, and aching lyricism in the same breath.

MS Paint: "Coffee at La Marina" - Terence Clarke. / Rumpelton"

• Ralph Rumpelton
• "Coffee at La Marina"
• RR-2025 - 040
  MS Paint on digital canvas, 571 X 581 px
• The Rumpelton Continuity (est. 1976)

“Here we see an audacious attempt at still life in which the French press is elevated into the realm of modernist icon. The objects refuse their proper proportions, instead floating in a kind of casual anarchy across the table. Perspective is not so much broken as politely excused from the room.”

 What critics are saying:

>>Eunice Gribble, Senior Critic of Domestic Mythologies and Tabletop Tensions, writes:

“Rumpelton’s latest still life attempts a cozy invocation but lands somewhere between brunch brochure and spectral rehearsal. The French press, crowned with what appears to be dairy foam or divine error, anchors the scene like a relic from a ritual no one remembers. The surrounding bread-like orbs—neither fruit nor offering—float in compositional purgatory, unclaimed by shadow or story.

The bouquet, meanwhile, is a riot without a manifesto. It screams color but whispers intent. Curtains frame the window like stagehands caught mid-shift, stiff and unconvincing. And the sky—flat, blue, and emotionally vacant—offers no mythic escape.

This is Rumpelton restrained. A glyph of hesitation. A domestic tableau that refuses rupture. It is not failure—it is prelude. A Pre-Fidelity murmur. A whisper before the Genesis Glyph roared.”<<

>>Professor Lionel Greaves – The Over-Explainer

North Atlantic School of Modern Reproduction Studies

“What many viewers fail to grasp is that this piece situates itself in the shadow of late-period Post-Dada kitchen table experiments, specifically those peripheral works circulating around the short-lived Neo-Appliqué Objectism movement of 1957–59. The French press, rendered with what appears to be a deliberate miscalibration of dimension, recalls Bernard Eversmith’s famous ‘Teapot without Spout’ (Rotterdam, 1961). Meanwhile, the lopsided fruit echoes the rustic anti-commercialism of rural Lithuanian pantry paintings, themselves a rejoinder to early Soviet kitchen propaganda.

The flowers—ah, the flowers!—burst into the composition like an unsanctioned footnote, insisting on chromatic joy while undermining the table’s precarious geometry. Even the turquoise curtains participate in this scholarly dialogue, wavering between domestic privacy and theatrical framing.

In sum, one cannot simply look at this painting; one must historicize it, contextualize it, and ultimately surrender to its wayward but entirely intentional misalignments.”

—Professor Lionel Greaves<<

>>Bertrand "The Brush" Barnaby:

"In 'Still Life with Flowers and Assorted Blobs,' Ralph Rumpelton delivers a cacophony of color and chaos that defies the very tenets of representational art. With all the finesse of a caffeinated kindergartener on a sugar high, Rumpelton mashes together a vase, some flowers, and what might be apples or maybe just lumps of angst on a table that looks like it was drawn by a sleep-deprived geometry student. And yet... there's a certain jejune charm to this MS Paint monstrosity. Like watching a toddler attempt to conduct a symphony with a spatula . Rumpelton's Rumpeltonian Cubism is a travesty and a triumph – a delightful travesty. In the pantheon of pixel art disasters, this ranks as a lovable oddity. "<<

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Gerald Thimbleton Interviews Ralph Rumpleton

 Interview Title: “Oil, Pixels, and the Collapse of Civilization”

Participants: Gerald Thimbleton & Ralph Rumpelton
Location: The offices of Beige Canvas Quarterly

---

Gerald Thimbleton:
Mr. Rumpelton, thank you for joining me. I will begin plainly. You work primarily in MS Paint. Why?

Ralph Rumpelton:
Because it’s there. And because it does exactly what I tell it to do—nothing more. Oil paint wants to collaborate. MS Paint obeys.

Thimbleton:
Oil paint “collaborates” because it possesses depth. History. Resistance. When I see your work described in the same breath as Vincent van Gogh, I regard it as—well—you know my position.

Rumpelton:
Yes. A slap in the face to oil paint. You’ve said so. Several times. Possibly embroidered on a pillow somewhere.

Thimbleton:
Mockery is not rebuttal. Van Gogh bent oil to his will through discipline and suffering. You wield a mouse.

Rumpelton:
Incorrect. I wield a mouse badly. That’s the point. Constraint. Limitation. The refusal of polish. It’s closer to cave painting than salon realism.

Thimbleton:
Cave painting predates oil. It does not excuse abandoning technique.

Rumpelton:
Who says I’ve abandoned it? Suggestion requires discipline. When I “Rumpeltize” a face, I’m reducing it to structural inevitabilities—eyes, nose, tension lines. I’m asking: what’s the minimum required for recognition?

Thimbleton:
Minimums are for building codes, not portraiture.

Rumpelton:
And yet you recognized the subject.

Thimbleton:
Recognition is not transcendence.

Rumpelton:
Transcendence is overrated. I’m after disturbance. Familiarity that feels slightly wrong. Like hearing a symphony played on a toy piano.

Thimbleton:
You are romanticizing deficiency.

Rumpelton:
No, I’m interrogating reverence. Oil painting has had centuries to prove itself. MS Paint has had what—Windows 95? It’s democratic. Anyone can use it. That terrifies people who equate difficulty with virtue.

Thimbleton:
Virtue lies in mastery. The brushstroke contains the history of the hand.

Rumpelton:
And the pixel contains the history of the click. Just because it’s mechanical doesn’t mean it’s soulless.

Thimbleton:
You cannot persuade me that the digital smudge carries the gravitas of impasto.

Rumpelton:
I’m not trying to. I’m saying gravitas might not be the only measure of worth. Sometimes absurdity is the more honest register.

Thimbleton:
So your project is satire?

Rumpelton:
Partly. But satire can love what it distorts. When I exaggerate features, I’m not desecrating tradition—I’m acknowledging it. You can’t parody what you don’t study.

Thimbleton:
You claim lineage, then, with classical painting?

Rumpelton:
Absolutely. Reduction is a classical strategy. Think of caricature. Think of early iconography. Think of what happens when you strip a face down to geometry.

Thimbleton:
You are very comfortable invoking tradition for someone who refuses its materials.

Rumpelton:
Materials change. Anxiety doesn’t. Painters once said oil was inferior to fresco. Now oil is sacred. Give pixels a century.

Thimbleton:
Heaven help us.

Rumpelton:
You sound worried.

Thimbleton:
I am protective. When critics casually compare contemporary experiment to masters, standards erode.

Rumpelton:
Maybe standards evolve.

Thimbleton:
Evolution implies improvement.

Rumpelton:
Or adaptation. I’m adapting to a world where images are screens, not canvases. My work looks native there.

Thimbleton:
And what of permanence? Oil survives centuries.

Rumpelton:
So do screenshots.

Thimbleton:
That is not reassuring.

Rumpelton:
It’s not meant to be. I don’t want comfort. I want someone to look at a Rumpeltized face and feel both recognition and unease.

Thimbleton:
You admit, then, that unease is the goal.

Rumpelton:
Yes. Unease keeps art alive. Reverence embalms it.

Thimbleton:
You see oil as embalmed?

Rumpelton:
I see the attitude around it as embalmed. The medium itself is innocent.

Thimbleton:
A surprisingly diplomatic note.

Rumpelton:
I don’t hate oil paint. I just refuse to kneel before it.

Thimbleton:
And I refuse to bow before MS Paint.

Rumpelton:
Good. If we both refused to bow, maybe we’d finally look at the work instead of the altar.

Thimbleton:
You are infuriatingly articulate for a man who draws with a spray tool.

Rumpelton:
And you are impressively theatrical for a man defending beige.

Thimbleton:
Beige is timeless.

Rumpelton:
So is awkwardness.

Thimbleton:
I suspect this debate will continue.

Rumpelton:
I hope so. Art without argument is décor.

MS Paint: Hank Mobley - "Soul Station" / Ralph Rumpelton

 Ralph Rumpelton

Hank Mobley - Soul Station, 2025
MS Paint on digital canvas, 601 x 593 px
RR-2025-036
The Rumpelton Continuity (est. 1976)

What the critics are saying:

>>"Soul Station: A Primitive Amuse-Bouche" by Gustave Palette

This MS Paint rendering of Hank Mobley's Soul Station arrives at the table like a street vendor's approximation of haute cuisine—crude implements, questionable technique, yet possessing an undeniable earnestness that one cannot entirely dismiss.

The color palette, if we can call it that, suggests a blueberry reduction left too long on the heat—that muddy, oxidized quality when fruit has given up its brightness. The figure itself resembles nothing so much as an underproofed brioche: the proportions collapsed, the structure compromised, yet you sense the baker meant well. Those elongated arms stretch like taffy pulled by an overenthusiastic child, while the hands—mon Dieu—appear to have been piped through a pastry bag with a damaged tip.

The facial features haunt me. The teeth particularly evoke a badly segmented citrus supreme, each segment cut with a dull knife by trembling hands. There's an unsettling quality here, like finding a hair in your soufflé—it transforms the entire experience from pleasant to vaguely disturbing.

Yet I must acknowledge: there exists in this work a certain je ne sais quoi, a naive charm reminiscent of a child's first attempt at crème brûlée. The ambition is visible, even if the execution suggests the artist was working with oven mitts on.

Rating: ★½ out of ★★★★★
Best appreciated quickly, from a distance, perhaps after several glasses of wine.

—Gustave Palette, "The Gallery Gourmand"

>>“Soul Station” — Entry No. 84031

Parallel Comparative Exhibition, Avachives Series I
Curated by Eunice Gribble

“Mobley’s spectral blue is not a mood—it’s a format decision. The saxophone, rendered in pixel austerity, resists nostalgia and dares the viewer to remember incorrectly.”

This reinterpretation, presented alongside its canonical Blue Note source, exemplifies the Avachives’ mandate: not homage, but interrogation. The background’s ruddy haze suggests a corrupted JPEG of a jazz club, while Mobley’s silhouette floats like a misaligned transparency layer. The text, too, is suspect—names stacked like metadata, the “Ralph Rumpelton” tag stamped with bureaucratic finality.

Gribble notes the absence of drop shadow as “a moral stance.” She praises the pixel economy (“no gradients wasted”) and condemns the font choice as “deliberately uncooperative.” The juxtaposition is not merely visual—it’s a test of aesthetic memory. Can the viewer recall Mobley’s tone without the gloss of album art? Can sincerity survive MS Paint?

“This is not a cover. It is a compression ritual. And I am moved.”

Expect commentary. Expect judgment. Expect pearls.
— E.G.<<

 >>Bertrand "The Brush" Barnaby on Ralph's "Hank Mobley Soul Station":

"In 'Hank Mobley Soul Station,' Ralph Rumpelton wields MS Paint like a rusty axe through the tender flesh of jazz homage. The resultant figure – a blue monolith blowing sax amidst murky shadows – is an awkward marriage of primitivism and pastiche. One cannot help but wonder if Rumpelton's dalliance with pixelated expressionism is sincere homage or smirking send-up. The brushstrokes (or rather, pixel-strokes) are blunt, the color palette a murky homage to Blue Note's moody mystique.

And yet... there is a lurching, discordant charm. Like a child banging pots to approximate Art Blakey's polyrhythms. Rumpelton's bold inelegance in 'Soul Station' teeters between naïve enthusiasm and deliberate crudeness – a duality that, against all odds, captures some jagged essence of Mobley's searching tenor. Will Rumpelton's crude digital primitivism find favor among pixel art's underappreciated ranks? Only time (and Barnaby's further scrutiny) will tell."<<

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Rumpeltonian Minimal Excessism

                                  Manifesto excerpt, Ralph Rumpelton

We, the Minimal Excessists, believe that too little is not enough and too much is not enough either. The perfect work exists in the space between clutter and vacuum — a visual sigh. Every line must argue with its own existence. Every color must apologize for being there.

A true Minimal Excessist knows restraint and indulgence are the same muscle flexed in opposite mirrors. MS Paint is our temple: one brushstroke too many, one pixel too few, both divine errors.

We do not edit — we reduce by adding.

Motto: “Simplicity, overcomplicated.”

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