Middleman

Think of Raoul Middleman and inevitably you think of landscape paintings, then of portraits. He's not as known for his narrative paintings. But the five narrative paintings on view at Maryland Art Place will change that. They are a revelation -- not only different, but also his best work.They are monumental in scale (up to 10-by-16-feet) and baroque in concept: dynamic and dramatic, with intensity of color and emotion. The paintings, crowded with figures, are characterized by Middleman's active brush stroke, so that at first 5l glance they may look casually executed.

Imagine one morning you're craving something sweet, so you stop by the corner doughnut shop. Turns out the wait is half an hour, the clerk is rude and, when you finally get it, the doughnut is stale. Would you buy doughnuts there again? Of course not. Yet, every day, millions of Americans put up with just that kind of service in their physicians' offices. And they keep going back. Anyone who has visited a primary care doctor lately knows the drill: You show up on time, only to wait 45 minutes or even an hour.

One of Raoul Middleman's most perceptive statements about his art, in a revealing 1990 essay, was, ". . . skies with lots of hurtling clouds, before or after a storm, are my thing." If there are any doubts about that, a visit to Steven Scott, site of "Raoul Middleman: Recent Landscapes, Portraits and Still Lifes," will dispel it.The skies in Middleman's landscapes, seascapes and cityscapes show him at his energetic best. His tense, impatient brush stroke lends his clouds a fine dynamic sense, and his color adds to the intensity of these skies.

Costs keep going up for One Straw Farm in Baltimore County: fuel, labor, boxes for the harvested vegetables. But the price wholesalers pay for that produce doesn't always rise at the same pace - sometimes, in fact, it goes down. Such depressingly simple math has doomed family farm after family farm. But this particular farm in White Hall is part of a global movement that changes the equation, cutting out the long line of middlemen between producers and food shoppers. One Straw Farm doesn't even have to get bank loans anymore, thanks to eight years of "community-supported agriculture."

A glance at Raoul Middleman's oil paintings might suggest that the Baltimore artist is the David Lynch of oils. Both men revel in city images that are bizarre, garish, even slightly rotten, and both fill their worlds with deceptively ordinary, grotesque people.The painter's work, however -- currently on display in two local shows -- is not merely a celebration of the lurid, but an invitation to perceive life's mystery and richness from simultaneous perspectives. It is no accident that, in spite of his abstractionist leanings, Mr. Middleman relentlessly concentrates on very familiar modes of visual art -- portraits, landscapes, and cityscapes.

I usually dislike artists' statements -- they tend to be pompous and/or silly -- but Raoul Middleman's statement accompanying his current show at Artshowcase is different. It's almost chatty, and begins in a self-deprecatory way:"In a dream I had, my eldest son asked what kind of artist I was, to which I replied that I thought I was an expressionist. 'You're no expressionist, Daddy; you're an impatientist.' "That's true. Encountering a Middleman show, one admires the nervous energy of his brush stroke, but wishes the artist had the patience and discipline to keep it from simply going sloppy over and over, at least partly spoiling the effect of what might otherwise be dynamic, dramatic pictures.

When Raoul Middleman paints a portrait, his brush strokes have so much expressionistic fervor that the subjects have no choice but to come alive on the canvas. When he paints a landscape, he brings the same vigor to his depictions of Baltimore's gritty industrial heritage.During his long career as a Baltimore artist, Middleman has sought out people and places that are not pretty -- at least by conventional standards. His take on Baltimore will not be found in tourist brochures.As the 56-year-old artist himself pungently points out in a statement for his one-man show at the Jewish Community Center: "I like to paint people who are on the fringe, disenfranchised, alienated, not surrounded by a bunch of bourgeois bric-a-brac."

For more than 30 years, painter Raoul Middleman has been one of Baltimore's most prolific and readily identifiable artists. Middleman checks in again this season with a delectable exhibit of landscape paintings at C. Grimaldis Gallery through May 3. Middleman's work is a refreshing break from the by now ubiquitous blue landscapes that have dominated decorative paintings of Maryland and similarly picturesque locales for decades. Instead, Middleman renders these scenes afresh with great warmth and affection through calculated use of reds, oranges and yellows that complement the cool hues of sky, water and greenery.

I am a little late. It's 10 minutes after 1 o'clock when I ring the bells -- one electric, one pulled on a string -- at Raoul Middleman's studio a block and a half north of the Guilford Avenue bridge. I have come to have my portrait painted.A painter of landscapes, portraits and narrative paintings, Raoul Middleman is one of the best-known artists working in Baltimore. He has decided to do a series of portraits of people associated with art in Baltimore -- Grace Hartigan, Joyce Scott, Gary Vikan, etc. -- and has asked me to be one of his subjects.

Want to spend quality time with the movers and shakers of the Baltimore art world? Painter Raoul Middleman gives you the chance through an exhibit of his portraits of museum directors, artists, curators and other prominent figures on the local scene.Among the notable aspects of his show at the Steven Scott Gallery is that it's surely the only time you'll ever find these arts advocates rendered speechless.Mr. Middleman's expressive brushwork speaks for them. Wielding a brush as if he were an Old West gunslinger, Mr. Middleman executes fast and furious portraits in which the sitter's personality usually comes across with uncanny incisiveness.

KIEV, Ukraine -- Natural gas supplies to Europe dipped sharply yesterday in the continuing conflict between Russia and Ukraine, but Moscow said it would significantly restore exports as early as today to prevent other countries from being held hostage to the price dispute. With many European nations reporting decreases in their gas imports as Russia attempted to cut off fuel supplies to middleman Ukraine, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe appealed to the two former Soviet nations to "explore, in a constructive manner, all options that could bring about a mutually satisfactory solution."

An artist sits in front of his easel painting a floral still-life set up on his studio table. The expression he wears is earnest, but also a little melancholy, as if he were contemplating anew the traditional meaning of his subject: the fleeting nature of beauty, and of life itself. Self Portrait With Flowers is one of the highlights of Raoul Middleman's show of paintings and watercolors at C. Grimaldis Gallery. Middleman's images in People and Places: recent paintings and works on paper generally have the unmistakably energetic brushstrokes and quicksilver spontaneity we've come to expect from Middleman's signature artworks.

The summer show at C. Grimaldis Gallery is always a lively affair, being a recapitulation of artists we've come to know in previous exhibitions and an intriguing taste of what's in store when the fall season arrives. This year's show is as varied and elegant as ever, with many beautiful and poignant paintings by Grace Hartigan, Raoul Middleman, Eugene Leake and Henry Coe. Coe's modestly scaled landscapes of the French countryside, in particular, are marvels of pastoral quietude. A highlight of this show is two recent, large-scale color photographs by Athens-based artist Dimitra Lazaridou, whose virtuosic control of composition and color signals a major evolution in this gifted photographer's work.

The show of narrative paintings at C. Grimaldis Gallery, which brings together six artists of widely varying technique and style, is hard not to like. There are plenty of the Usual Suspects here from the gallery's stable of house artists: Grace Hartigan, Raoul Middleman, Beverly McIver and Tony Shore. They are joined by two interesting newcomers, the Calcutta-born, Baltimore-based painter Sangram Majumdar and Minneapolis-based David Rich. Rich, making his Baltimore debut this month, paints in a brushy, figurative style that makes the most of the subtle color harmonies in his palette.

For more than 30 years, painter Raoul Middleman has been one of Baltimore's most prolific and readily identifiable artists. Middleman checks in again this season with a delectable exhibit of landscape paintings at C. Grimaldis Gallery through May 3. Middleman's work is a refreshing break from the by now ubiquitous blue landscapes that have dominated decorative paintings of Maryland and similarly picturesque locales for decades. Instead, Middleman renders these scenes afresh with great warmth and affection through calculated use of reds, oranges and yellows that complement the cool hues of sky, water and greenery.

ALEXANDRIA, Va. - A Bahamian businessman testified yesterday that he served as the middleman as hundreds of thousands of dollars were swiftly and routinely wired in and out of an offshore bank account for a firm whose principals are on trial for visa fraud. Testifying in U.S. District Court here, Howell Jones said the wire transfers, most of them in the $400,000 range, were so frequent that officials at one bank raised concerns that the actions appeared to resemble a money laundering scheme.

Cezanne, an early father of modernism, advised artists to look to nature for inspiration. Modernism has come and gone, but the representation of nature -- albeit in unconventional, sometimes quirky ways -- remains a touchstone for those who have followed.Modernism began by reinventing the primitive. Painters gradually abandoned the realistic deep space of Renaissance perspective for the flattened planes of Asian art and the iconic figures of African sculpture.In the postmodern era, the primitive has been replaced by the quotidian.

Of all of the people who have had their pocketbooks fattened by the go-go economy of the 1990s, almost no one has made out better than Michael Dell.Dell, the founder, chairman, chief executive officer, namesake and house deity of Dell Computer Corp., is widely considered the fourth-richest person in the United States, with an overall wealth of $13 billion.In a hypercharged age when multibillion-dollar sums litter the business pages like ticker-tape confetti, it's worth pausing a moment to reflect on the fact that one man could have $13 billion to his name.

Years ago I boarded in a house whose walls were hung with several commissioned portraits of my landlord's family painted by Baltimore artist Raoul Middleman. Living with these paintings lent them a certain homey familiarity over time, and after a while they seemed almost as artless and uncomplicated as snapshots. It was only when someone in the family happened to stand next to his or her portrait, and the painted image suddenly confronted the real one, that you saw how radically Middleman's art had transformed its subject.

Best that weather forcasters err, if at all, on the side of preparedness. Dick Cheney is the nearest this administration gets to the indispensable man, and owes it to us all to pace himself accordingly. It's a crime to import New Jersey wine without a Maryland middleman -- just the lunacy the Constitutional Convention of 1787 was meant to correct. Whatever else he has done, Albert Belle always did his best.