John Middleton has been collecting the flotsam and jetsam he’s come across over years of beach combing. Each piece carried home simply because it could not be left behind to an unknown fate even if he wasn’t sure how he might use that broken bit of signage or weathered, water-soaked chunk of driftwood.
These were gifts from an ocean that no longer wanted them bobbing about. Once carried to the tide line, someone came along, someone who thought, “There’s a story.”
Middleton is that someone, but his own journey is one that speaks to a life ever evolving, ever changing like sea glass polished over and over again.
Originally from San Francisco, Middleton grew up in Kansas City. He studied at the University of Kansas where he received bachelor degrees in English and History. Later he earned a PhD from Indiana University. His dissertation was on Moby Dick.
Middleton’s first professional act was that of a professor of English at Georgia State University specializing in American Literature. He has also received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
For his second act, Middleton pursued a career in sales and marketing. Upon retiring from the business world, he stepped into his third act, earning a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth.
Middleton has always collected materials from beaches wherever he goes. Those objects became very important to him once he began to see them as potential pieces of art and embarked on his fourth act, an artist using the medium of found objects to create stunning and thought-provoking works.
On his website, Middleton notes, “Time, tides, wind, storms, marine organisms and sun transform objects … in ways that can render them strange and beautiful.” The changes sustained by wood, glass or metal that has been submerged in ocean waters leaves the materials “scraped and scoured into new forms that obscure their original history.” Where nature leaves off, Middleton begins to give those found objects their new lives.
When we caught up with Middleton at his home in Mattapoisett, he had just returned from installing a number of his pieces in that Mattapoisett Library for a one-man show now on display through mid-January. We asked him about the creative process that he said was rather complex, but he did offer, “I see how pieces align, and I focus on some of the details that punctuate the pieces.”
Using glue, screws and other affixing materials, individual pieces like a new type of puzzle are pulled together by Middleton into something altogether different from the original intent.
Middleton said that he does occasionally add a touch of paint or other objects “to underscore and focus attention” on specific features, but overall the finished work is made from materials left in their found state. “Mechanical skills are critical to the joinery of objects in a completed work,” he added.
At his studio located in the Hatch Street Studios in New Bedford, home to numerous visual artists of all stripes, Middleton creates his own kind of magic: transforming, rearranging, creating beauty that emerges from an eye that sees what lies within.
Other locations where Middleton’s work has been exhibited include the Marion Art Center, Bromfield Gallery in Boston, Shattuck Gallery in Westport, the Falmouth Artists Guild and the Mattapoisett Museum.
One final note: Middleton credits the much-loved novel Moby Dick for bringing him to this area. No doubt, Melville would be pleased.
By Marilou Newell