Ralph Rumpelton (b. ???, whereabouts unknown) is a digital folk artist best known for his MS Paint reinterpretations of classic album covers, cultural oddities, and spiritual weather reports. His work blends outsider art rawness with a lo-fi pixel aesthetic—what one critic called “if a cassette tape had a dream and woke up covered in yogurt.”
Rumpelton’s artistic journey began in confusion. Enrolled briefly at the Eastern Institute of Conceptual Something (a now-defunct satellite campus in New Jersey), he was famously kicked out after submitting a 12-foot-long painting of a spaghetti dinner titled "Monday is Just a Suggestion". Faculty claimed it "defied medium, meaning, and taste."
Unfazed, Rumpelton took to MS Paint, citing its “lack of undo button and abundance of courage.” He developed a style that celebrates smudges, crooked lines, and visual accidents—"the stuff real life is made of," he says. In his words, “Art should feel like it got away from you, but you kept it anyway.”
He doesn’t exhibit in galleries. Instead, Rumpelton’s work is released in unpredictable drops on obscure blogs, public library computers, and once, according to legend, slipped into a church bulletin in Poughkeepsie. He communicates only through a middleman who claims to receive the digital files via flash drive in a manila envelope marked "FROM RUMP."
Rumpelton has been called a prank, a prophet, and “moderately gifted” by a Reddit commenter. He remains anonymous, possibly retired, possibly not real. But the work keeps coming.
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