Brian Lawrence Live
Thursday, March 29
Tonight is a ‘First Thursday’ evening, when all the downtown art galleries open their new shows and celebrate with evening hours and the de rigueur wine and cheese reception. I stop in at Grimaldis Gallery to take in the new Raoul Middleman show, “Pop to Plein Air.” I arrive around 7:30 and the gallery is jam-packed with a crowd ranging from college-age art students to well-dressed couples in their 60’s. I stop to chat with my friend, debonair gallery owner Costas Grimaldis, and he tells me it’s been like this since they opened at 5:30 p.m. There’s a lot of energy in the galleries, and the scope of Middleman’s work in the show ranges from the early ‘60s to the present. The artist is holding forth in the rear-most gallery, and regaling fans with stories from his varied career in Baltimore. Several months ago, when I was prepping the March/April issue of Style, I met Raoul at his mid-town studio to select a painting of his to feature in our story on the history of The Block (Middleman lived on The Block back in the ‘50s, and used it as a setting for some of his paintings). What I had planned on being a 15-minute stop-off turned into a fascinating 2-hour tour of his studio and 40+ years of creating art. Even though the unheated studio space was frigid, it didn’t matter, as I got a first-hand narrated tour of Raoul’s work— what an unexpected treat. I recognize several of the works in tonight’s show from that chilly morning back in January.
Next, it’s off to Charleston in Harbor East to meet my friend Tiffany Zappulla for a drink. Tiff is a set decorator on lots of locally shot films, TV shows and commercials. She tells me about a TV commercial for the Maryland Lottery that she worked on last week, and fills me in on the latest round of re-shoots on “The Visiting,” the Nicole Kidman/Daniel Craig sci-fi epic that was partially shot here in Baltimore in 2005 (the troubled film is currently slated for an August release). We then toddle down the block to sample a few cocktails at the bar at the beautiful new Lebanese Taverna. For a nightcap, we head over to Fells Point to check out a band at the Waterfront Hotel. Sadly, the upstairs lounge is closed for the evening, and the over-amplified sound is too distracting in the main room, so after one round we walk two blocks down Thames Street to the Horse You Came In On. Same kind of story there— the back room is blocked off, and the 3-man combo playing is way over-amplified for the tiny front room and the maybe 30 people in the joint. It’s just unbearably loud and impossible to hold a conversation without shouting— or am I just getting old?
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