MS Paint. Freddie Hubbard - "Red Clay" / "Ralph Rumpelton" Art

• Ralph Rumpelton
• Freddie Hubbard - "Red Clay
• RR-2025-047
  MS Paint on digital canvas, 611 X 594 px
• The Rumpelton Continuity (est. 1976)

 What the critics are saying?

“Red Clay (Engulfment Frame)” — Critique by Eliot Varn

I viewed Ralph Rumpelton’s Red Clay reinterpretation through a warped pane of VHS static, the kind that once bled into late-night jazz broadcasts on public access. What I saw was not a sun, nor clay, but a memory of rupture disguised as warmth. The central burst—neither explosion nor eclipse—feels like a forged recollection of a childhood fire drill, where the alarm was color, not sound.

The black field is not void but archival silence. It recalls the hiss between tracks on a bootleg Herbie Hancock cassette, where emotional undertow lives in the absence of fidelity. The red-orange bloom is too symmetrical to be trusted. It’s a counterfeit trauma, pixelated into ritual. I suspect Rumpelton knows this. I suspect he’s baiting us.

The purple signature in the corner—“Ralph Rumpelton”—is not authorship but sabotage. It’s the stamp Linty never forged, the one that disrupts not postal order but emotional chronology. It dares the viewer to misremember their own myth.

This is not MS Paint. This is mythic clay rendered in digital refusal. Each pixel whispers: Let the rupture be decorative. Let the eclipse be polite. Let the myth misremember itself.

I give it no rating. I give it a corrupted liner note and a half-remembered Sun Ra chord.<<

>>Dr. Horace Plimwell — The Archivist of Blunt Truths

Excerpt from The Compendium of Modern Jazz Iconography (Vol. XII)

“Ralph Rumpelton’s Red Clay is a painting that does not so much depict Freddie Hubbard’s classic as it erupts in protest against it. What was once a mysterious solar bloom in deep space has here been rendered as an impatient sun, scalding the viewer into attention. There is no smoke, no nuance—only the raw combustion of pigment and ego.

The typography, arranged like a nervous press release, threatens collapse but somehow maintains its composure, much like the quintet on the original record. The red mass itself—thick, impulsive, almost childishly confident—seems to declare, ‘I understand this music better than color theory ever could.’

One suspects that Rumpelton didn’t paint this; he detonated it. The result is not interpretation but detonation—a glowing, awkward, brilliant refusal to play it cool.”<<

>>Beatrix Hollenstein – Vienna Center for Tragic Aesthetics

On Ralph Rumpelton's "Red Clay (After Hubbard)"

Here, in this crimson catastrophe, we witness nothing less than the murder of form itself. Rumpelton has given us not an homage but a eulogy—a brutal, unflinching meditation on the impossibility of capturing beauty in our degraded digital age.

The violent red slashes tear across the void like wounds across the body of Jazz herself. That pitiful yellow orb at the center—is it the sun? The eye of God? No. It is the last dying ember of Hubbard's genius, suffocating beneath the crude violence of Microsoft's most primitive tool. We watch it expire in real-time.

The typography screams its own agony. "Red Clay" writhes in tortured sans-serif, while Hubbard's name floats above like a ghost, a specter of what once was—when music had visual poetry, when album art had soul. The collaborators' names (Henderson, Hancock, Carter, White) are listed like casualties of war. Which, in this context, they are.

And that signature—"Ralph Rumpelton"—scrawled in the corner like a confession at a crime scene. The artist does not hide. He cannot hide. This is his Golgotha.

What Rumpelton has created is not art. It is a document of cultural collapse. It is the aesthetic equivalent of a scream in an empty room. And we, the viewers, are complicit in this tragedy simply by bearing witness.

Five stars. Devastating.<<

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