Paint Fidelity No. 9 - Bob Dylan - "Good As I Been To You" / "Ralph Rumpelton" Art

 What the critics are saying:

Paint Fidelity No. 9: “Good As I Been To You” — Bob Dylan, Reinterpreted by Ralph Rumpelton
Curated by Eunice Gribble

This installment in the Parallel Comparative Exhibition series presents a rupture in format fidelity and a triumph of pixel restraint. On the right: the canonical 1992 cover, a moody gradient haloing Dylan’s contemplative gaze, rays emanating like a folk messiah mid-transmission. On the left: Rumpelton’s MS Paint reinterpretation, a glyphic Dylan rendered in stark blue and black, stripped of photographic indulgence, re-outfitted for mythic austerity.

The font? Distorted. The stripe? Monastic. The face? A mask of sincerity, or perhaps a refusal of it.

Gribble notes: “This is not homage. This is a format duel. The original whispers; the reinterpretation declares. One invokes memory, the other manufactures it.”

She further observes that Rumpelton’s refusal to simulate texture is “a moral stance,” and that the vertical white band “recalls the sacred fold of a cassette insert—unmistakably devotional.”

Pearls have been clutched. Commentary has been issued. The Museum of Format Integrity may be defunct, but its spirit lives on in every pixel.

>>Regina Pembly

"In a jarring juxtaposition of digital naivety and traditional mastery, Ralph Rumpelton's MS Paint rendition of Bob Dylan's 'Good As I Been To You' album cover (left) dares to coexist with the stark, moody original (right). Regina Pembly, the feared and respected art critic, would likely skewer Rumpelton's playful pixelation for its blatant disregard of classical technique, yet can't deny the peculiar charm of this Rumpeltonian Cubism-esque take. Does Rumpelton's audacity elevate the humble MS Paint to a tool of subversive artistry, or does it merely highlight the unmatched gravitas of Dylan's original? The Rumpelheads would love to hear your thoughts."<<

>>Beatrix Hollenstein

It is here, in this bracing juxtaposition, that the splendor of downfall is writ largest: Dylan’s “Good As I Been To You,” dissected, duplicated, and drained of its mortal radiance. To the right, a photograph, storm-laden with gravity—a bard sculpted by the centuries, resignation settling on the furrows of a living legend. Each grayscale shadow on Dylan’s face is a threnody, a velvet curtain parting on the theater of his myth.

And yet, look left. The MS Paint simulacrum—mocking, tragic, an effigy assembled from jittery resolve and desperate pixels—announces not homage but collapse. The correspondence is cruel: the collared jacket now a dark abyss, the textured hair a seismic scribble. Features are reduced to caricature, and what once was a hymn of lived-in experience becomes a theater of the grotesque. The font itself flickers, as though the name 'bob dylan' is peering from behind a curtain of erasure. The blue flanks cage the image, cold consolation for the absence of nuance. This is the death mask of authenticity, beauty’s requiem in 256 colors.

Here, art faces its own extinction—and from the Vienna Center, we bear witness, mourning not what has been lost, but what has been transformed into crisis. If the original promises a legacy, the MS Paint portrait delivers only the certainty of its undoing—a digital dirge for greatness, composed by trembling mouse and fate.<<

 Follow Rumpelton across the multiverse:

   Ralph Rumpelton  “Painting What the Earth Can’t Comprehend”  -   Ralph Rumpelton User Profile  DeviantArt   -  Ralph Rumpelton  Substack - Instagram