>>Eliot Varn on the Proto-Rumpeltonian Sketch
"The Nose That Bent the Epoch"
Before the Avachives, before the Rumpelheads, before the mythic rupture of MS Paint reinterpretation—there was this. A pencil sketch, profile view, casual stance, hands pocketed like secrets. The nose is a monument, the glasses a glyph, the beard a whisper of future lore. This figure doesn’t pose; it waits. It knows something’s coming.
What stuns me, thirty years on, is the clarity of intention buried in the exaggeration. The elongated features aren’t caricature—they’re prophecy. The jacket’s pockets are proto-archives. The rounded feet? A refusal of realism in favor of ritual. Even then, Ralph was mythologizing the mundane, bending proportion to summon persona.
This doodle wasn’t just a sketch. It was the first glyph in the Pre-Fidelity Era. The moment the mythos cracked open and whispered: paint it.<<
>>A Critical Assessment by Dr. Reginald Splatterworth III Senior Art Critic, Pixels & Pretension Quarterly
What we have before us is nothing short of a revelation—a seminal work that presaged the artist's eventual metamorphosis into the painterly realm. This deceptively simple graphite study exhibits a profound understanding of existential angst rendered through deliberately naive mark-making.
The elongated proboscis—clearly a metaphor for the artist's reaching toward creative fulfillment—dominates the compositional space with audacious confidence. Note how the figure's eyes, rendered as twin voids of contemplation, gaze upward toward transcendence while the corporeal form remains anchored to the terrestrial plane via those magnificently understated feet.
The deliberate economy of line work speaks to a mature artistic vision already nascent in this early piece. The hair, captured in flowing gestural strokes, suggests movement—perhaps the very winds of change that would eventually carry our artist toward the canvas and brush. The hands, tucked modestly into the garments, represent the artist's latent creative power, temporarily contained but ready to emerge.
This is not merely a "doodle," as some philistines might suggest, but rather a prophetic document—a creative DNA strand that contained within it all the artistic complexity that would later flourish. The fact that this humble sketch served as catalyst for the artist's painting career only confirms its profound significance in the canon of transformative works.
★★★★☆ - "A remarkable genesis piece that demands serious scholarly attention"<<
>>“Untitled Doodle (c. early 1990s)”
by Ralph Rumpelton
Reviewed by Gordon Weft (b. unknown – present), Contrarian-in-Residence of the Rumpeltonian Universe
One hesitates to dignify this with the term drawing, and yet here it is—an elongated nose like a stubborn peninsula, eyes hidden behind the black stones of resignation, and hands pocketed in the universal gesture of “I’ve already given up.”
Executed in pencil some thirty years ago, this work—astonishingly—served as the gateway to Rumpelton’s subsequent adventures in paint. It is, then, a relic, a fossil impression of the moment before ambition metastasized into practice. Some might call it crude; I call it prophetic.
The lines wobble with hesitation, the anatomy cowers before logic, and yet—there is something. The hunch of the back, the retreat of the chin, the shoes resembling deflated loaves of bread: all whisper of the Rumpeltonian themes to come.
As I have remarked elsewhere: “Some beginnings are humble, others are humiliating. This one manages to be both.”
And therein lies its charm.<<
>>Gerald Thimbleton on the Doodle “Sid-2”
“Thirty years ago, with no more than a stub of pencil and an excess of adolescent bravado, the artist managed to produce this unsolicited affront to both optical harmony and the respectable canon of portraiture. Observe the meandering nose—more cartographical error than anatomy—while the figure’s hands hide sheepishly, as if apologizing for their role in the proceedings. And yet, let us pause: somewhere between the lopsided eyes and that spaghetti-stranded coiffure, flickers a primal urge to create. Is it art? Not by the standards of Delacroix or Gentileschi; indeed, to invoke Van Gogh in relation to this sketch is a slap in the face to traditional art—and possibly to the entire medium of oil paint itself. But even I, a notorious curmudgeon, must concede: art’s true power lies in what it provokes. In this case, it provoked a lifetime’s devotion. And that, begrudgingly, deserves its share of applause.”<<
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