MS Paint: Freddie Hubbard – First Light / Rumpelton

• Ralph Rumpelton
• Freddie Hubbard – First Light
• RR-2025-044
  MS Paint on digital canvas, 590 X 594 px
• The Rumpelton Continuity (est. 1976)

“In this luminous re-envisioning of Freddie Hubbard’s classic, Rumpelton distills the trumpet not as an object but as a psychic event. The instrument is rendered as pure motion—an ecstatic scribble vibrating somewhere between jazz notation and an electrical malfunction—while the shadowed figure behind it refuses to declare itself, lingering in a kind of blue-lipped twilight. The result is an image that hums, like Hubbard’s horn warming up before the first impossible note.”

 What the critics are saying:

>>Dr. Horace Plimwell

It has long been my contention—controversial, perhaps, but undeniably correct—that the true arena in which Rumpelton operates is neither the representational nor the abstract, but the precarious borderland of what I have elsewhere termed “proto-iconic indeterminacy.” In this latest MS Paint manifestation, a bold and frankly audacious reinterpretation of Freddie Hubbard’s First Light, the artist once again demonstrates his singular capacity to excavate ontological density from the most obstinately pixelated of mediums.

Observe, if you will, the trumpet: not depicted so much as summoned, its chromatic resonance vibrating across the pictorial field like an errant pulse in a cosmic electrocardiogram. These looping yellow conduits—simultaneously confident and unhinged—gesture toward instrumentation while steadfastly refusing to commit to anything so bourgeois as accuracy. It is here that Rumpelton’s genius flickers: the horn becomes not a horn, but the memory of a horn refracted through a dream of jazz heard from another room.

Behind this incandescent tangle, the silhouetted presence of Hubbard himself (or perhaps merely an emanation thereof) hovers in an expanse of deep nocturnal blue. Placed in such deliberate semi-obscurity, the figure accrues an aura of negative-space significance, what some lesser critics might reductively call “mystery.” I would instead propose that this shadow constitutes a visual palimpsest—an archive of potential identities overwritten by the luminous insistence of the instrument.

Thus, in a work that could easily have collapsed under the weight of its own ambition, Rumpelton achieves something remarkable: a composition that is simultaneously radiant and reticent, chaotic and precise, humble in its means yet galactic in its aspirations. To call it a reinterpretation of an album cover is to miss the point entirely. What we have here is not homage, but revelation.<<

>>Dale of the Brook’s Racketless Review of “First Light” by Ralph Rumpelton

Delivered mid-submersion, scribbled on a damp napkin wedged into a cattail.

I whispered “First Light” to the brook. It burbled back a trumpet solo in algae minor. I knew then: this piece rinses.

The trumpet—golden, glistening, grotesquely honest—pierces the canvas like a loofah dipped in memory. It exfoliates my clavicle. The silhouette? A shadow soaked in regret, playing notes that sound like wet socks slapping tile. I approve.

The blue? Not dry. Not symmetrical. It swirls like bathwater after a confession. I submerged my left armpit in its aura and emerged cleansed. The brushwork? Moist enough to pass the Soap Test. I felt scrubbed. I felt seen.

Rumpelton’s restraint is a mildew miracle. He resists tennis. He resists symmetry. He resists dryness. This is not an homage—it’s a baptism. I licked the lower right corner. It tasted like jazz.

Rating: Four and a half suds out of five.
Docked half a sud for legibility. I prefer my titles smeared.<<

Follow Ralph Rumpelton across the net.