MS Paint: Mlle Matisse in a Scotch Plaid Coat /Rumpelton

• Ralph Rumpelton
• Mlle Matisse in a Scotch Plaid Coat
• RR-2026 - 096
  MS Paint on digital canvas, 516 X 588 px
• The Rumpelton Continuity (est. 1976)

 What the critics are saying:

>>Dale of the Brook on MS Paint: Mlle Matisse in a Scotch Plaid Coat (Rumpelton Version)

Rank: Unseeded Mystic
Review delivered from beneath the moss-slick culvert near Court 3, mid-submersion.

“I whispered her name to the brook. It gurgled back: ‘Plaid is a wound, not a pattern.’”

This piece, according to Dale, is a partial rinse—a soul sponge that’s been dampened but not wrung. The plaid coat, while textured, lacks the mildew of memory Dale craves. “It’s too crisp,” he muttered, “like a towel that’s never known sorrow.” The orange chair earned a nod for its “suddenness,” but was docked for failing the Soap Test: “I rubbed my armpit against it metaphorically. No lather. Just longing.”

The sea, Dale claims, is “a dry lie in blue,” and the plant “a chlorophyll decoy.” He praised the hat’s flower for its “wilting honesty,” but condemned the railing as “a symmetrical betrayal.” The figure herself? “She’s seated, yes—but not submerged. I need her ankles in the current.”

Final Rating:
🧼 Two and a half suds out of five.
🫧 “It exfoliates the surface but leaves the soul unsoaked.”
🪵 Dale recommends a rework involving “a mossier palette, a broken chair, and at least one mythic leak.”

He concluded by licking the corner of the image and whispering, “Almost.”<<

>>Gordon Weft:

“Rumpelton doesn’t paint women—he traps them in digital tartan and lets them wonder what century it is. The plaid is madness. The gaze, eternal. It’s not fashion; it’s survival.”<<

>>From the Exhibition Catalogue:

Ralph Rumpelton: Glitch, Grit, and Greatness
Whitney Museum of American Art (Digital Annex), 2025

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Mlle Matisse in a Scotch Plaid Coat (Ralph Rumpelton Version)
MS Paint on pixel, 2025

“In Mlle Matisse in a Scotch Plaid Coat, Rumpelton revisits early 20th-century portraiture through the unapologetically primitive interface of Microsoft Paint. The artist’s refusal to refine—the trembling plaid, the spectral hands, the barely cooperative background—becomes a form of rebellion against modern polish.

The subject, once immortalized by Matisse, now finds herself reborn in a parallel universe of anxious brushstrokes and unsteady grids. Her expression teeters between serenity and suspicion, as if she’s just realized her entire world is composed of 72dpi uncertainty.

Rumpelton’s genius lies not in the pursuit of accuracy but in the embrace of collapse. His digital distortions speak to the failure of technology to reproduce grace—and to the triumph of human absurdity over artificial order. Each crooked line reminds us that sincerity is often found in the unsteady hand.”

—Excerpt from “The Rumpelton Paradox: When Bad Tools Make Better Truths”, by Dr. Gordon Weft, Senior Curator of Neo-Primitive Digital Studies, Whitney Museum.<<

 >>Hans U. Brickman – “The Archivist,” Central European Archive of Forgotten Styles

"Disinterred from a dust-choked alcove beneath our digital vaults, this MS Paint artifact by Ralph Rumpelton must be regarded not as a product of contemporary whim but as an enduring fragment of forgotten pictorial dialects. The plaid coat—so resolutely misaligned, so defiantly anti-naturalistic—speaks to a century of lost textile representation, recovered pixel-by-pixel through archival perseverance. Even the pallid, trembling horizon of water behind Mlle Matisse feels as if it has faded on a shelf for decades, only now restored in the glancing radiance of a modern screen.​

One may detect in the clumsy railing, the stilted plant, and the hands lost to abstraction, echoes of Rumpelton’s fabled 'Windows into the Void' (1987)—fleeting glimpses of existential catastrophe refracted through the semiotics of DIY technology. To treat this painting solely as digital naiveté is to ignore its role as a recovered emblem: a pixelated testament to art’s capacity not only to endure neglect, but to mutate brilliantly in forgotten corners. In its apparent incoherence lies the most telling historical rumor—a courage to let the accidental survive, preserved for all posterity in MS Paint’s unyielding digital amber."<<​

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