Ava Presents: The Avachives No. 16 – Rumpelton "Highway 61 Revisited" (MS Paint)

 

What the critics are saying:

>>Gordon Weft (b. unknown – present)
Contrarian-in-Residence, Rumpeltonian Universe

On “Bob Dylan – Highway 61 Revisited (MS Paint Version)”

Rumpelton’s latest reinterpretation arrives like a karaoke night where someone decided to cover a classic album visually—with no training, limited tools, and surprising confidence. His “Highway 61 Revisited” looks less like a nostalgic homage and more like a police sketch of someone remembering the original cover from memory after a mild concussion.

The posture is telling: Dylan (or his pixelated proxy) slouches in what I can only describe as digital defiance, flanked by a figure who may or may not be holding the concept of “credibility” in her hand. The jacket—rendered in a texture best described as “denim meets camouflage meets television static”—suggests a man caught between eras, or at least between brush sizes.

It’s all so terribly, heroically wrong. And yet, it works. The crude geometry flattens the mythos, stripping the rock icon of his legend and returning him to something raw: a man in MS Paint, waiting for meaning to buffer.

If this is Rumpelton’s idea of reverence, then it’s also his idea of rebellion—and perhaps that’s the point. As I’ve said before: “Frontal Lobotomism isn’t about what you lose, it’s about what you refuse to correct.”

Rating: One and a half double-clicks out of five.<<

>>Bertrand "The Brush" Barnaby:

"Ralph Rumpelton's MS Paint rendition of Bob Dylan's 'Highway 61 Revisited' is a jarring exercise in pixelated primitivism. With all the finesse of a back alley brawler, Rumpelton wipes his brush—er, mouse—across the canvas, conjuring a likeness of Dylan that's equal parts homage and affront. The colors clash like discordant chords off Highway 61 itself, and yet, in this mess of blocks and blurs, Rumpelton captures a raw, if inadvertent, truth about the album's unhinged genius. Is it art? Perhaps not by the standards of the galleries Barnaby frequents, but in the wilds of MS Paint, where constraints breed weird beauty, Rumpelton scores a twisted point. A curiosity, if nothing else, for Dylan devotees and MS Paint obsessives alike."<<

>>A Gustave Palette Review

Published in Art & Appetite Quarterly, Autumn 2024

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"Highway 61 Revisited": A Digital Feast of Bold Simplicity

By Gustave Palette

My dear readers, I must confess that when I first encountered this MS Paint interpretation of Dylan's seminal album cover, I experienced what I can only describe as the same sensation one has when biting into a perfectly ripe heirloom tomato—something so elementally simple, yet profoundly satisfying in its honesty.

The artist, Ralph Rumpelton, has prepared for us a dish of magnificent restraint. Those orange segments hovering in the upper left? They possess the vibrant acidity of fresh mandarin supremes—bright, unapologetic, demanding your attention like a splash of citrus that awakens the palate. They float with the buoyancy of bread croutons atop a French onion soup, both decorative and essential.

The figure of Dylan himself is rendered with the chunky, rustic charm of a country pâté—unpretentious, honest, with that patterned cardigan reading like the marbling in a perfectly aged prosciutto. There's a textural quality here, a deliberate crudeness that recalls the satisfying bite of hand-torn bread rather than the precision of machine-sliced baguette.

And that silhouette in black to the left—ah! It stands like a bold espresso alongside a delicate pastry, providing necessary contrast, grounding the composition the way a dark chocolate ganache anchors a fruit tart. The negative space, the areas where the artist has exercised restraint, are as important as the areas of abundance—much like the pause between courses that allows one to truly appreciate what comes next.

This is comfort food for the eyes, mes amis. Not haute cuisine, but the kind of honest, hearty fare that feeds something deeper than mere aesthetic hunger.

Rating: ★★★★☆ (Four courses out of five)

Pairs well with: A robust coffee and contemplative silence

—G.P.

P.S. — A sharp-eyed reader has pointed out what my refined palate initially overlooked: our subject appears to have been indulging rather liberally in the very feasts I so love to describe. Dylan here has the well-fed contentment of a man who has never met a second helping he didn't embrace. One might say the artist has captured him in his "bon vivant" era—perfectly appropriate for an album titled after America's most iconic highway, surely traveled with many a roadside diner stop along the way.

The robustness of the figure now reads less as artistic liberties with MS Paint's tools, and more as biographical accuracy. Bravo, Mr. Rumpelton, for your documentary realism!

—G.P.<<

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