Raoul Middleman
| Irrepressibly enthusiastic about his art, Middleman is steeped in the
roots of the imagery of Western painting. His tumultuous canvases with their
splashing brushstrokes, of landscapes, seascapes, portraits, still life’s
or narratives, each conveys his sense of joy and pleasure in its creation.
Middleman explores the whole range of the painter’s art. His portraits -- perverse and confrontational -- take as their subjects his family, friends, neighbors, street people, pulling truths from these faces his subjects may not have known were there. His landscapes are like cantatas composed of painterly fugues of light and shadow, line and color. He’s painted the French and Italian countryside, the Cape Cod seacoast, the farmlands of Maryland and Pennsylvania, and the landscape of Utah, among many other locations. Tramping around the Baltimore harbor area for most of his adult life, he finds beauty in rotting wharves, abandoned factories, rusted oil tanks. The thread that holds this explosion of productivity together is the joy he encounters in his work. His landscapes are inherently unstructured. They are given a meaning by their treatment: what is selected as a motif, the sense of near and far, the path the eye takes through space, how the light falls, how the air envelops, how the frame is filled. First and foremost is how the brushstroke picks out the contrasts, opacities, and transparencies, what shines and what is shaded.
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