Bill Wyman, Monkey Grip (Rumpelton Copy)
MS Paint on digital canvas, 2025
In this daring reinterpretation, the lush decadence of the original album sleeve is reborn through pixel austerity. The artist trades velvet folds for jagged outlines and replaces rock-star languor with a stare of cartoon inevitability. Here, Wyman becomes less man and more emblem—a flat, iconic witness to the 1970s reimagined in the earnest language of MS Paint.
Collection of the Rumpelton School, courtesy of Monkey Grip Studies.
>>“Here we witness the great migration of Bill Wyman—from lush, palm-frond decadence to the stripped-down austerity of pure Paint. The original cover (right) stages him as a louche jungle dandy, mid-70s ennui dripping from every fold of velvet. But the Rumpelton rendition (left) delivers something stranger, sharper: the posture stiffens, the belt becomes a glyph, and Wyman stares out not as rock star but as reluctant folk hero, conscripted into a myth of flat colors and earnest brush pixels.
In this split image, the glamour is peeled away like wallpaper, leaving a raw cartoon icon. It’s both parody and prophecy: Bill Wyman reduced, re-cast, and, in some odd way, reborn.”
—Gordon Weft, The Provincial Eye<<
>>Reginald Thornberry III, Art Critic for The Sophisticated Observer
"A Study in Digital Mediocrity: When Fan Art Goes Horribly Wrong"
What we have here is a textbook example of why not everyone should have access to Microsoft Paint. The artist's attempt to "reimagine" this classic piece of Americana demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of both proportion and the human form.
The left panel reads like a fever dream filtered through the artistic sensibilities of a particularly untalented child. The figure's torso appears to have been constructed by someone who has perhaps heard of anatomy but never actually witnessed it. The skin tone suggests either severe jaundice or an alarming fondness for orange crayons. The hair—if we can charitably call it that—hangs with all the natural flow of wet cardboard.
The background, a garish assault of primary colors, manages to make the subject look even more cartoonish than the artist's already considerable limitations had achieved. The proportions are so wildly off that one wonders if the artist was working while experiencing some form of visual disturbance.
Comparing this digital disaster to the original photograph only amplifies the tragedy. Where the source material possesses a certain raw authenticity, the "interpretation" strips away any vestige of dignity or artistic merit.
This is not art—this is digital vandalism masquerading as creativity.
Rating: ★☆☆☆☆<<
>>Gerald Thimbleton on "Monkey Grip" — Digital Dissent Versus Rock Tradition
"Presented with Ralph Rumpleton’s MS Paint homage beside the canonical ‘Monkey Grip’ sleeve, one confronts the very battleground of modern art—a battle in which every pixel is a provocation. Rumpleton’s digital palette is shamelessly synthetic; the red jacket, once lush velvet, now appears as a cartoon exoskeleton, and the tropics behind Wyman are reduced to the logic of children’s coloring books. Yet, I would argue this scrappy simulacrum performs a service: by stripping away the fetish of oil and the sanctity of photorealism, it thrusts the viewer face-first into the essential question—is a rock god still monumental if rendered in software most use for stick figures?
The original cover bathes Wyman in louche 1970s charisma, every fold of fabric and palm frond tuned to advertise his offhand sensuality. Rumpleton rejects this. His attempt is not pastiche but a contrarian stand, nearly an act of sabotage. In an age besotted with Instagram polish and digital perfection, such crudeness—almost adolescent in its refusal—reminds us there’s art in awkwardness, and that every medium, traditional or otherwise, is just another ‘grip’ for the restless hand of creation."<<
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