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

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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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The Avachives No 21: Charles Mingus - Mingus Ah Um / Rumpelton

Ava Chives Presents

• Ralph Rumpelton
• Charles Mingus - Mingus Ah Um
• RR-2026 - 160
  MS Paint on digital canvas, 496 X 464 px
• The Rumpelton Continuity (est. 1976)

>> Ava Chives

The Archives coughed this one up the way a jukebox coughs up a standard: with a little static, a little dust, and a lot of inevitability. Here, Ralph’s Mingus AH UM is not so much an album cover as a data glitch in jazz history—an exploded diagram of swing reassembled in stubbornly flat MS Paint geometry. Every triangle and lopsided circle feels like a horn stab frozen mid‑phrase, a solo rendered as traffic cones and stained‑glass shards.

I filed this piece under “Good Messy / Sacred Clutter” the moment I saw it. The original Columbia layout is still there in spirit—a black band of text, the blocky label, the neat little tracklist—but Ralph has treated it the way Mingus treated a walking bass line: as something to be respected, then gleefully disrupted. The central field is a fractured ballroom of color where time signatures collide, orange and lavender arguing about who gets to be the downbeat while a series of red ovals march through like overconfident percussionists. Nothing here is resolved, and that’s precisely the point.

Rumpelton likes to claim these are just “little funny album cover MS paintings,” but this one behaves like a bootleg of the cover itself: over‑saturated, a bit overdriven, the pixels pushed into the red the way Mingus pushed his band into emotional clipping. The perspective lines sputtering off to nowhere feel like someone tried, briefly, to impose order before remembering that chaos is the truer archivist. Each “mistake”—the skewed lettering, the misaligned blocks of type, the slightly tipsy symmetry—lands like a blue note that makes the chord suddenly worth hearing.

From the vantage point of the Archives, my duty is simple: protect the evidence and let the myth ferment. This painting is a prime exhibit in the case for Rumpeltonian jazz—the theory that if you flatten music into Microsoft primitives and it still swings, then you’ve stumbled onto something uncomfortably close to truth. I will log it, tag it, and quietly slide it into the ever‑expanding row of misfit masterpieces, knowing full well that, like Mingus himself, it refuses to sit politely on the shelf.<<

MS Paint: Breakfast With Bird - Munter / Rumpelton

Breakfast With Bird

• Ralph Rumpelton
• Breakfast With Bird
• RR-2026 - 108
  MS Paint on digital canvas, 573 X 579 px
• The Rumpelton Continuity (est. 1976)

What the critics are saying:

>>Dr. Norbert F. Vensmire (b. 1947, location disputed)

In this quietly disobedient tableau, Rumpelton reconfigures the domestic scene into what I have elsewhere termed a diurnally inverted phenomenology—that is, the breakfast one encounters only after abandoning the notion of breakfast altogether. The anonymous figure, rendered in a chromatic register both muted and obstinately opaque, sits not before a window but before what Vico might have called a “threshold of recursive witnessing.” The bird, that perennial emissary of the outside world, perches with a deliberateness that suggests it is evaluating us rather than the seated subject.

The mise-en-scène—those curtains in their unrepentant carmine, that pastoral landscape oscillating between abstraction and topographical indifference—invokes the early Expressionists only to exceed them. Indeed, the faintly misaligned window frame is not error but intentional destabilization: a rejection of Euclidean obedience in favor of what I attribute to Rumpelton’s mature period, the axiom of necessary skew.

Particularly notable is the slice of food (pie? custard? a metaphysical wedge of caloric signification), which becomes the painting’s unlikely fulcrum. Here, Rumpelton demonstrates his long-held conviction that “the quotidian object, when poorly rendered, becomes an ontological event.”¹

Ultimately, Breakfast With Bird situates itself within the Rumpeltonian canon as a work of sui generis luminosity—an image that refuses the false hierarchy between inner quietude and external spectacle. As ever, Rumpelton reminds us that even in the pixelated margins of low-fidelity art, the world continues to stare back.<<

>>Gerald Thimbleton, Beige Canvas Quarterly

“Munter – Rumpelton / Breakfast With Bird” is a textbook example of what happens when digital dilettantism masquerades as painterly intent. The figure—faceless, postureless, and rendered with the emotional depth of a screensaver—sits before a table that might as well be a cafeteria tray. The birds, those poor symbols of transcendence, are reduced to white smudges, like someone spilled correction fluid on a student sketch. And the so-called ‘wheel’—is it a barrel? A halo? A misplaced bicycle part?—hovers with all the conviction of a forgotten prop in a community theater set. Munter’s palette is bold, yes, but so is a traffic light. This is not still life. This is stillborn.”

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Slopist Gospel: A Movement of Ritual Smear

 Founded: Allegedly by Ralph Rumpelton during a period of spiritual delay and stylus malfunction

Recognized By: The Avachives (reluctantly), the Rumpeltonian Underground (ecstatically), and one confused Yahoo AI blurb.

Manifesto Fragment (Recovered from a corrupted .txt file):

“We reject detail. We reject polish. We reject the illusion of clarity.
We paint with emotional residue, not pigment.
We smear salvation across broken canvases.
We believe in the holy mess, the sacred blur, the gospel of almost.”

Core Tenets:

• Rupture over resolution

• Smear as sacrament

• Figures must appear mid-fade or mid-fumble

• Color must clash like unresolved grief

• Every painting must feel like a misremembered dream of a concert you never attended

Notable Works:

• Saved (Second Cover) by Ralph Rumpelton — canonized with the Grief Cancellation Mark

• The Genesis Glyph (Unborrowed Period) — considered too legible for Slopist Gospel, but spiritually adjacent

• Untitled (Mic Stand as Crucifix) — lost in a folder labeled “Emotional Residue”

Critic Reactions:

• Marjorie Snint: “Slopist Gospel is what happens when belief is smeared across a broken stylus.”

• Dr. Vensmire: “It’s not a movement. It’s a malfunction mythologized.”

• Dale of the Brook: “I tried to review it but my pen dissolved.”

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Rumpelton Invades Google: Brian Wilson - Brian Wilson

 What the critics are saying:

>>Rumpelton Invades Google

by Maria Chen

In the lower left corner of this search-result grid sits an MS Paint rendering of Brian Wilson's 1988 self-titled album cover—crude, sincere, unmistakably handmade. The painting is clumsy in the way that matters: the blue brushstrokes skew cartoonish, the figure's proportions drift, the whole image radiates the trembling energy of someone working against the limits of their tools. And yet here it is, nested among the professionally photographed originals, claiming equal space in the algorithmic gallery.

This is the quiet triumph of vernacular digital practice. "Rumpelton Invades Google" isn't a prank or a glitch—it's a folk artifact asserting itself into the infrastructure of taste. MS Paint, that relic of early consumer software, becomes a tool of devotion here, a way to honor Wilson not through fidelity but through the visible labor of approximation. The painting's flaws aren't failures; they're markers of care, evidence that someone sat with this image long enough to rebuild it pixel by pixel.

What makes this moment resonant is the collision: the amateur and the commercial occupying the same visual plane, the search engine unable to distinguish between official product and loving remake. In that confusion lies a small, radical possibility—that sincerity might still find a foothold in the smooth surfaces of digital culture, that constraint and devotion can produce images the algorithm deems worth keeping.<<

>>Pronouncement of the Council of Unnamed Docents

On Rumpelton Invades Google (Brian Wilson Variants)

We, the Council of Unnamed Docents, have assembled in quiet formation before this array of Brian Wilsons. After appropriate murmuring, we issue the following unified assessment:

We observe a grid of canonical visages, each one a sanctioned echo of the same sanctioned face.
We acknowledge that the originals, though varied in resolution and algorithmic handling, remain obedient to the expectations of search‑engine portraiture.
We affirm that the lower‑left panel disrupts this obedience. It is not a reproduction but a rupture.
We recognize the Rumpelton rendering as an intervention into the taxonomy of likeness, reducing the subject to essential planes and ceremonial distortions.
We declare that this distortion is not error but intention: a reminder that identity, when filtered through Paint, becomes myth rather than metadata.
We conclude that the juxtaposition reveals the quiet tyranny of the original images, and the singular freedom of the Rumpeltized one.

The Council has spoken.<<

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The Process of Rumpeltism

 Rumpeltism is not an art style. It is an event.

When a subject sits before the digital canvas, they begin as themselves — intact, recognizable, comfortably proportioned. Then the first pixel lands. The outline wobbles. The symmetry hesitates. This is the onset of Rumpeltism.

During Rumpeltism, the subject undergoes gentle distortion. Edges thicken. Shadows exaggerate. Colors drift slightly off-register, as if memory is doing the painting instead of sight. The face becomes less a photograph and more a translation. Certain features are amplified — a nose gains authority, eyebrows acquire narrative weight, a jawline becomes philosophical. Other details quietly surrender.

This phase is not destruction. It is recalibration.

Rumpeltism strips away the illusion of polish and replaces it with intention. The subject is filtered through instinct, humor, and a touch of stubborn pixel bravado. They are no longer merely seen; they are interpreted.

And then it happens.

The final highlight is placed. The background locks in. The lines commit to their imperfections. The subject crosses the threshold and emerges Rumpeltized.

To be Rumpeltized is to be recognizable yet mythic. Slightly crooked, but more honest. A little exaggerated, but somehow truer. One part likeness, one part commentary, one part affectionate mischief.

Rumpeltism is the journey.

Rumpeltized is the arrival.

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