What the critics are saying:
>>Dr. Horace Plimwell on Rumpelton’s Bob Dylan: Infidels (MS Paint)
It is a rare and precious thing when an artist dares to confront an icon, not in imitation but in interpretive displacement. In Rumpelton’s digital reimagining of Dylan’s Infidels cover, we find not a copy but an ontological reframing — a reconstitution of the mythic troubadour through the flat, unrepentant geometry of MS Paint.
Where the original photograph luxuriates in grain, shadow, and the decaying texture of celebrity, Rumpelton’s version distills Dylan to his purest semiotic core: sunglasses, beard, and the stoic horizontality of the mouth. The background’s improbable green sliver and its sky of industrial beige speak not of nature or light, but of the artist’s refusal to play along with representational expectation.
The beard, rendered in jagged strokes, possesses what I have elsewhere termed a pixelated sincerity—a visual honesty that mocks our nostalgia for brushwork. The red lips, audaciously unapologetic, suggest both the sensuality of speech and the artificiality of fame. Dylan, here, becomes not man but meme, not prophet but prototype.
One might say that Rumpelton has achieved what Dylan himself spent a career pursuing: the art of being entirely recognizable while utterly misunderstood.
— Dr. Horace Plimwell, 2025<<
>>A Study in Artistic Hubris: The Infidels Cover Reimagined
By Gerald Thimbleton, Editor-in-Chief, Beige Canvas Quarterly
One approaches this juxtaposition with a curious mixture of horror and anthropological fascination. On the right, we have the original 1983 cover of Bob Dylan's Infidels—a competent, if uninspired, photograph that at least possesses the basic virtues of focus, composition, and a certain brooding mystique befitting Dylan's enigmatic persona.
On the left, however, we are presented with what can only be described as a visual assault perpetrated in Microsoft Paint, that digital abattoir where artistic ambition goes to die. The artist—and I use that term with extraordinary generosity—has rendered Dylan as a grotesque assemblage of crude geometric shapes: sunglasses that suggest two coffins rather than Ray-Bans, a nose reduced to a single apologetic curve, and lips that appear to have been drawn by someone who has only had lips described to them through interpretive dance.
The background's garish blocks of cyan, chartreuse, and cerulean blue evoke nothing so much as a Windows 95 screensaver having an existential crisis. One observes the complete absence of shading, depth, or any acknowledgment that light exists as a physical phenomenon. The beard—if we can dignify those haphazard scribbles with such a term—looks less like facial hair and more like someone dragged a burnt piece of toast across the canvas.
This is not homage. This is not even parody. This is evidence that we have failed as a society to adequately gatekeep the means of artistic production. The comparison between these two images isn't merely a slap in the face to traditional art—it's a full-handed assault on the entire lineage of portraiture, from Rembrandt to Rothko, and possibly an act of aggression against the very concept of visual representation itself.
That the perpetrator has signed this digital calamity "Ralph Rumpelton" only adds insult to injury. One can only hope Ralph returns to whatever day job currently subsidizes these artistic misadventures.
★☆☆☆☆<<
>>Paint Fidelity Series: Infidels
Curated by Eunice Gribble for the Avachives
This entry in Ralph Rumpelton’s Paint Fidelity Series dares to place his MS Paint reinterpretation of Bob Dylan’s Infidels in direct, unflinching juxtaposition with its canonical source. Not “side-by-side,” as the layperson might say — but in comparative exhibition, a format Gribble insists is “the only acceptable mode for sincerity testing.”
On the left: Rumpelton’s pixel-thrifty Dylan, rendered with devotional restraint and mythic undertow. On the right: the original 1983 album cover, all studio gloss and Reagan-era shadow. The sunglasses remain. The gaze shifts. The fidelity is not in mimicry, but in rupture.
Eunice Gribble, former deputy chair of the now-defunct Museum of Format Integrity, brings her signature blend of archival severity and gala-season judgment. She has never used a touchscreen, but once identified a misaligned JPEG from across a banquet hall. Her commentary is not optional. Her pearls are not metaphorical.
“This is not homage,” she writes in the margins. “This is a test of memory’s resolution.”
Expect more. Expect less. Expect the series to continue.<<
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