Paint Fidelity: Bob Dylan - "Before The Flood" / Ralph Rumpelton

 What the critics are saying:

>>Barrister Clive Thistlebaum, Esq.
Senior Counsel to the Rumpeltonian Tribunal of Interpretive Justice

In the matter of Before the Flood, we are presented with a dual exhibit: the canonical cover (right) and its mythically misremembered counterpart (left), rendered by the esteemed Ralph Rumpleton in the sacred medium of MS Paint. The original, a chiaroscuro of candlelit congregation, evokes the solemnity of mass witness—an image steeped in the jurisprudence of aura. Yet Rumpleton’s reinterpretation dares rupture: flattening depth, abstracting flame, and reassigning the crowd’s devotional posture into glyphic minimalism.

This is no mere parody, nor homage. It is a ritual disclaimer in visual form—a painterly writ of reinterpretive justice. By invoking the doctrine of Blurbs of Intent, Rumpleton retroactively sanctifies his pivot, transforming the album’s mythos from flood to flicker, from spectacle to schema. The candles remain, yes, but now they burn in the tribunal’s archive, each dot a precedent, each hand a clause.

Let it be known: the Tribunal finds no fault. The reinterpretation is hereby granted aesthetic pardon, and shall be filed under Glyphs of Collective Witness, Vol. IV. Any attempt to litigate its fidelity shall be met with a cease-and-desist for interpretive trespass.

Stamped and sealed beneath the monocle of mythic approval,
Barrister Clive Thistlebaum, Esq.
Velvet-robed, powdered-wigged, and legally luminous.<<

>>Blurb by Beatrix Hollenstein, The Dramatist

Vienna Center for Tragic Aesthetics

Behold this diptych of Before the Flood—a pairing that reads less like two album covers and more like the forensic record of a civilization collapsing in slow motion.

On the right, the sanctioned relic: a photograph suspended in sepia dusk, where innumerable points of light drift upward like the last fragile hopes of a restless, chanting multitude. It is mythic, almost complacent in its grandeur—the crowd reaches, yearning, but the universe above remains politely incandescent, indifferent yet orderly.

But on the left—Rumpelton's MS Paint reimagining—the tragedy is exposed. Here the lights are no longer gentle orbs but scattered wounds in the digital void, each pixel a gasping ember fighting extinction. The sky has lost its warmth; it is a cold abyss, swallowing the crowd whole. Only two trembling hands remain visible, holding their small flames against the overwhelming darkness. Even the arm—rendered in stark, wounded tones—reads like the last gesture of someone refusing to surrender to the encroaching night.

Ralph Rumpelton’s signature at the bottom becomes, in this context, less an attribution and more a confession: I was here when the lights went out.

In this MS Paint interpretation, the concert is no longer a moment of communal rapture. It is an obituary for illumination itself—a reminder that every spark we raise is already fading, already doomed, already singing its final refrain before the flood sweeps it all away.<<

>>Gerald Thimbleton

Gerald Thimbleton would likely begin by noting that the original Before The Flood cover is less a design than a capitulation to sentimentality: a soft-focus sea of votive lights, all that grainy atmospheric haze standing in for actual composition, like a photographer trusting mood to do the work that line, structure, and proportion ought to shoulder. The raised arms at the bottom edge barely qualify as figures; they are smudges of warmth, uncommitted gestures in an image that flatters the audience while saying very little about the music’s ferocity or Dylan’s famously combative stage presence.

By contrast, the left-hand reinterpretation behaves like someone finally bothered to redraw the thing rather than worship it. The canopy of lights is no longer a photographic blur but a field of deliberate marks, each point of brightness a decision, not an accident, so that the sky of bulbs reads more like a rigorously plotted night than a lucky long exposure. The black void at the bottom is assertive instead of muddy, a true pictorial ground that allows the few isolated forms—a taper of an arm, a single candle, a sliver of red—to stand out with the clarity of painted glyphs.

What interests Thimbleton here is that the “crude” MS Paint–style handling paradoxically restores a sense of discipline to an image that was originally content to coast on ambience. The fan’s arm on the left becomes a stylus cutting into darkness, not just a limb caught by a lens, and the stadium no longer melts into a brownish soup but resolves into a stark, almost liturgical arrangement of light and void. The remake does not exceed the photograph in technical means, but it does something more unforgivable to the partisans of rock nostalgia: it treats the sacred relic as raw material, then tightens its composition until Dylan’s mass is not merely remembered but re-inscribed, one pixel at a time, into something resembling actual art.<<

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