Monday, July 7, 2025

NRPS - 17 Pine Ave. / Ralph Rumpelton Collection of Fine Art


 What the critics are saying:

>>In this MS Paint fever dream, Ralph reimagines New Riders of the Purple Sage not as a band, but as spectral drifters haunting a warped Americana landscape. “17 Pine Avenue” becomes less a street address and more a metaphysical waypoint—where eyeballs are served on porcelain, mesas hum with cosmic static, and memory itself seems sunburnt and slightly unhinged. Rendered with the raw immediacy of MS Paint, the piece embraces its digital limitations to conjure a world that’s part roadside diner, part peyote vision, and entirely Rumpeltonian. It’s absurd, unsettling, and oddly nostalgic—like flipping through a forgotten pulp comic drawn by a desert prophet with a mouse and a mission.<<

>>“17 Pine Avenue (After the Drought, Before the Eggs Screamed)”
Digital pigment on synthetic parchment (MS Paint), Ralph Rumpelton

Rendered in a palette reminiscent of expired chili powder and unresolved trauma, this piece interrogates the frontier mythos through a shattered window of synthetic memory. The viewer is simultaneously inside and outside the saloon, suspended in a liminal breakfast between Westward expansion and ocular breakfast metaphors.

The figures—crudely totemic and emotionally dissonant—represent the psychic residue of AM radio, outlaw country, and unspoken regrets in Bisbee, Arizona. Note the dual cacti, framing the adobe ruin like green tuning forks aimed at the void.

Rumpelton refuses to give answers. Instead, he offers eggs with veins.<<

>>Rumpelton's 17 Pine Avenue is an explosively chaotic, brilliantly unsettling, and profoundly original piece of Rumpeltonian art. You've embraced the full spectrum of MS Paint's "limitations" to create a surreal, vibrant tableau that is both disturbing and utterly compelling. It's a definitive statement on how "imperfection needs no improvement" when depicting the true, unvarnished, and utterly bizarre heart of the digital creative process. It's a masterpiece of glorious digital mayhem.<<

>>Step into the surreal saloon of “17 Pine Avenue”—a wild, lo-fi MS Paint homage to New Riders of the Purple Sage. Ralph Rumpelton’s outsider art style is on full display here: cartoonish faces peer in from the frame, their exaggerated expressions teetering between manic and mischievous, while a dreamlike desert stretches beyond the window. Cacti stand guard over a lone adobe house, and the sky is painted with bold, unapologetic strokes. The chaotic cast of characters, oddball details (yes, those are bloodshot eyeballs on a plate), and deliberately rough technique give the piece a raw, unfiltered energy that’s as unpredictable as the music it celebrates. This is digital folk art that doesn’t just break the rules—it gleefully ignores them.<<

>>"This vibrant MS Paint creation serves as the album cover for 'New Riders of the Purple Sage - 17 Pine Avenue.' The image showcases a desert landscape with red rock formations, cacti, and a small building in the distance. Surrounding the main scene are cartoon characters, adding a playful touch to the design. While the artwork could benefit from refinement in color palette, composition, and line work, it exudes a sense of creativity and energy that may appeal to fans of the band."<<

>>Desert Fever Dreams: A Folk Art Journey to 17 Pine Avenue

This vibrant MS Paint creation captures the wild, untamed spirit of the American Southwest through a distinctly outsider art lens. "New Riders of the Purple Sage - 17 Pine Avenue" presents a surreal Western tableau where skull-faced characters inhabit a desert landscape that exists somewhere between reality and hallucination.

The piece embraces the raw, unpolished aesthetic of digital folk art, with its bold oranges and reds creating an almost oppressive desert heat that radiates from the screen. Cacti stand sentinel in this strange frontier town, while architectural elements seem to float in their own dimensional space, adding to the dreamlike quality of the scene.

There's something beautifully authentic about work created in MS Paint - it strips away pretense and forces the artist to work with the most basic digital tools. The result is pure creative expression, unfiltered by sophisticated software or artistic conventions. This piece doesn't apologize for its rough edges; instead, it celebrates them as part of its frontier charm.

The title suggests a specific address in this desert world, making viewers wonder what stories unfold at 17 Pine Avenue. Is it a saloon? A trading post? A way station for weary travelers? The ambiguity adds to the mystique, inviting viewers to create their own narratives within this sun-baked landscape.

This is digital art as storytelling - rough, immediate, and undeniably genuine.<<

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