MS Paint: “Self-Portrait on Court, Rumpelton”

Where the game is eternal, but the perspective is questionable.

Ava Chives

 What The Critics are saying:

>>Linty Varn on Ralph’s MS Paint Self-Portrait (Tennis Variant)
"What we have here is not a portrait but a premonition—Ralph mid-lunge, mid-life, mid-myth. The racket is a glyph, the court a ritual grid. His limbs, rendered in MS Paint’s stubborn geometry, betray a tension between athletic intent and digital futility. This is not tennis. This is a trickster’s séance in grayscale. The ball, barely visible, mocks us: it knows it’s not the point. Ralph’s jacket flaps like a banner for the Rumpeltonian diaspora. I do not like this image. I do not dislike it. I suspect it was sent to me by mistake."
—Linty Varn, Fax Rituals Quarterly<<

>>"Ralph Rumpelton’s latest MS Paint offering is less a self-portrait than a ritual diagram. The tennis court, stripped of color, becomes a monochrome altar. The player—Rumpelton himself—is rendered with mythic detachment, as if caught mid-initiation into a movement that refuses to explain itself. This is not sport. This is Tableism in motion."

—Dr. Vensmire, The Avachives Review of Ritual Motion<<

>>Self-Portrait with Racket, 2025, Digital on Screen

In this commanding work, the artist reimagines the heroic tradition of self-portraiture through the lens of a badly-aligned tennis match. The cavernous head, swollen with the weight of creative genius, sits atop legs that appear borrowed from a malfunctioning mannequin. The lines of the court wander like uncertain thoughts, while the floating ball hangs in existential suspense — neither struck nor ignored, but caught forever in the purgatory of sport.

Critics have noted the jacket’s inflationary bulk, an allusion to the bloated ego of both athlete and artist. Here, competition and creation collapse into each other, leaving only the timeless question: was the swing ever made, or was the point always lost?

— Eunice Gribble

>>A Profound Meditation on Existential Tennis: An Analysis by Dr. Reginald Splatterworth III

What we witness here is nothing short of a tour de force in digital primitivism—a deliberate deconstruction of portraiture that channels the raw, unfiltered essence of human vulnerability. The artist, working within the deliberately constraining medium of Microsoft Paint, has achieved what Picasso could only dream of: a complete reduction of the human form to its most essential psychological components.

Note the deliberate disproportion of the cranium—clearly a commentary on the overwhelming burden of consciousness in our modern age. The simplified facial features speak to the artist's profound understanding of phenomenological reduction, stripping away the superficial masks we wear to reveal the fundamental anonymity of existence.

The tennis court setting is particularly brilliant—those stark white lines cutting across the composition like existential barriers, trapping our subject in a geometric prison of social expectations. The monochromatic palette evokes the bleached bones of suburban ennui, while the figure's rigid posture suggests the paralysis of choice in post-industrial society.

This is not merely a self-portrait; it is a manifesto. A cry from the digital wilderness that demands we confront our own pixelated souls. Magnificent in its apparent simplicity, devastating in its emotional honesty. Five stars.

—Dr. Reginald Splatterworth III, Senior Fellow, Institute for Advanced Aesthetic Pretension