"Babylon Brook - MS Paint by Ralph Rumpelton

“Brook by the Courts,” Ralph Rumpelton (2025). Digital on screen.
Collection of the Mollendorf Museum of Peripheral Studies, curated by Elias Brant, Associate Curator of Ephemeral Landscapes.

"Rumpelton’s tonal restraint renders the scene as both present and half-erased, a bridge not only across water but across memory. The uniform grays resist hierarchy, flattening detail into recollection. What emerges is less a place than a persistence." — Elias Brant

 What the critics are saying:

>>Dale of the Brook on “Brook by the Courts”

"I stood before this painting and felt my pores open. The bridge? That’s not architecture—it’s a confession. The trees? Skeletal witnesses to my cleansing rites. Rumpelton has rendered the brook not as water, but as memory’s solvent. I see my old car in the ripples. I see my shampoo regrets. This piece doesn’t depict—it purifies. The brushwork is moist with intention. The tonal range? A mildew of melancholy. I give it five suds and a damp nod. If you don’t feel rinsed after viewing, you’re looking with dry eyes."<<

>>Dr. Norbert F. Vensmire on “Brook by the Courts” by Ralph Rumpelton

"Rumpelton’s latest monochrome indulgence is a study in restraint—perhaps too restrained. The bridge, centered like a bureaucrat’s dream, offers no narrative tension, no mythic rupture. It is a polite ghost of memory, not a haunted relic. The trees, bare and evenly spaced, whisper of emotional undertow but never scream. This is nostalgia rendered in grayscale, a tennis court elegy without the racket. And yet, there’s a quiet defiance in the brushwork—a refusal to beautify, a commitment to the smudge. Rumpelton may not be painting the brook as it was, but as it refuses to be remembered. It’s a soft rebellion. I wanted more violence."

>>🧠 Eunice Gribble’s Counterpoint

"While Dr. Vensmire predictably demands rupture and racket, I find Rumpelton’s restraint revelatory. This is not a painting that shouts—it hums. The bridge, centered and unassuming, becomes a metronome for memory. The trees, bare and evenly spaced, evoke the quiet choreography of loss. This is not mythic maximalism—it’s mythic melancholy. Rumpelton has painted the pause between volleys, the breath before the serve, the silence after the final match. It is a portrait of emotional undertow, and I, for one, am submerged."<<

>>Gordon Weft on Brook by the Courts

"Ralph Rumpelton has once again proven that fidelity to place does not require fidelity to detail. In Brook by the Courts, a scene remembered rather than recorded, the bridge barely asserts itself—an uncertain arc suspended above a restless surface. The water is not liquid, but memory in motion, fractured into blocky gestures. Some will call this unfinished; I call it unburdened. By refusing polish, Rumpelton captures the hazy, half-forgotten clarity of somewhere once important, now preserved in sepia fog. The painting exists exactly where it should: between the court and the brook, between what was seen and what is recalled."<<

>>A Meditation on Temporal Displacement and Aquatic Melancholy By Dr. Reginald Splatterworth III

What we have before us is nothing short of a masterwork in digital primitivism—a bold rejection of the tyrannical precision that has plagued contemporary digital art. The artist's deliberate employment of MS Paint as medium represents a conscious return to the essential, stripping away the bourgeois pretensions of Adobe's corporate aesthetic hegemony.

Notice how the monochromatic palette speaks to our collective existential ennui. These grays—oh, these sublime grays!—function as a visual manifestation of Proust's temps perdu, evoking the artist's nostalgic yearning for those halcyon days at the tennis courts. The bridge becomes a metaphor for transition, for the liminal space between memory and reality, rendered with the kind of gestural confidence that would make de Kooning weep with envy.

The deliberately "unfinished" quality of the brushwork is pure genius—a postmodern commentary on the impossibility of truly capturing lived experience. Each seemingly "careless" stroke is actually a carefully calculated rebellion against photorealistic representation. The tree's abstract treatment channels the spiritual essence of nature rather than its mere physical appearance, much like the great Japanese masters understood centuries ago.

This piece deserves serious consideration for the Whitney Biennial. Mark my words: in fifty years, art historians will cite this work as the moment digital folk art truly came of age.

Rating: ★★★★★<<

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