As one longtime buddy, Abram "Al" Engelman, puts it: "When you look at Raoul's self-portraits, people may say, 'Obviously the man is a narcissist. In reality, his friends say, Middleman is exploring something subtler and far more interesting. And though the 374 paintings on view at MICA represent less than 4 percent of the roughly 10,000 artworks Middleman has created, some show visitors might assume the artist has an oversized ego. Middleman isn't just blazingly fast he's also notoriously prolific. His two favorite phrases are, "Let me tell you a funny story" and (after one of his philosophical musings) "Does that make sense?" Though Middleman later attended art schools in Brooklyn and Philadelphia, he dropped out of both. He worked briefly as a cowboy in the 1950s after earning a bachelor's degree in philosophy from the Johns Hopkins University. As a boy, he spent a lot of time at the Pimlico racetrack (to the horror of his country club-attending parents). He quotes Plato and Nietzsche, but his friends are plumbers and cabdrivers. Do you know that quote from Wordsworth? 'Our meddling intellect / misshapes the beauteous forms of things.
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"The hardest thing I had to teach myself was how to not go back into the paintings. "I've got some portraits I created in 20 minutes and some that I've worked on for 15 years," Middleman says, "but the best stuff usually happens right away because it's fresh and concise. How long does is take for a stallion galloping at 40 miles an hour to run past a man with a sketch pad? Three seconds? Four? Yet these drawings - no more than a blur of color and a few squiggly lines - practically stride off the page. Consider, for instance, his Pimlico works.
It's astounding, really, just how quick Middleman is.
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