Round Table Discussion: Ralph Rumpelton’s “A Love Supreme / John Coltrane” (MS Paint)

“Rendered on a 2003 Dell at 3 a.m., this reinterpretation of A Love Supreme captures Coltrane’s spiritual ecstasy through the power of one trembling pixel at a time. Divinity meets lag.”

Round Table Discussion: Ralph Rumpelton’s “A Love Supreme / John Coltrane” (MS Paint)

Gerald Thimbleton (Editor-in-Chief, Beige Canvas Quarterly):
Let’s begin with the obvious: this piece should not work. It’s rendered in MS Paint, the digital equivalent of finger-painting on a napkin. And yet—somehow—it does. The composition holds. The brushwork—or rather, the pixel-stutter—evokes something of Coltrane’s own fractured transcendence. Still, I find myself annoyed by the audacity of it. You cannot reinterpret A Love Supreme without grappling with the spiritual gravity of the source. This version replaces that gravity with... googly eyes. It’s almost insulting, and I rather admire that.

Professor Lionel Greaves (North Atlantic School of Modern Reproduction Studies):
Ah, Gerald, but you’re missing the entire subtext! This isn’t parody; it’s relic-making. Rumpelton’s piece could sit comfortably within the lesser-known current of Post-Sincerist Pixel Expressionism that emerged from late-2000s internet minimalism. The exaggerated eyes, for example, may reference the divine illumination of Coltrane’s “Acknowledgement” suite—translating auditory enlightenment into digital naiveté. It’s a visual echo of the solo: awkward, trembling, and yet utterly sincere.

Hans U. Brickman (Central European Archive of Forgotten Styles):
Indeed, Professor. I’d go further. The muted palette and ghostly architecture suggest an image rediscovered—something rescued from the damp archives of an extinct Windows 98 installation. It feels like a found artifact, preserved not on canvas but in corrupted data. One can almost hear the static hum of an old CRT monitor beneath Coltrane’s saxophone. If I didn’t know better, I’d say Rumpelton unearthed this work from a forgotten digital chapel devoted to jazz deities.

Thimbleton:
You’re both romanticizing. Let’s call it what it is: a charming act of vandalism. The original A Love Supreme cover is a photograph steeped in reverence. Here, Rumpelton replaces that with caricature—a cartoonish yet haunting stand-in. It’s as though a museum portrait suddenly started blinking. Disrespectful? Possibly. Effective? Unquestionably.

Greaves:
That’s precisely the power of it! The “MS Paint-ness” isn’t a limitation—it’s the theology. Rumpelton is democratizing reverence. He’s saying, “You don’t need divine tools to touch the sacred.”

Brickman:
Or perhaps he’s saying, “Even the sacred is subject to pixelation.” A sobering thought.

Thimbleton (closing):
A heretical cover, then—half homage, half heresy. And in the age of flawless digital art, that may be the truest form of devotion.

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