"Labor," one of Jason Middlebrook's pieces on display at the John Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco, suggests the work ethic that themes his show.
By Suzanne Cristallo
Jason Middlebrook has returned home for a visit after two years of working in New York, an experience which has given him a perspective of time, of people and most importantly, of himself.
He is an artist, the son of an artist father and a landscape designer mother. And he is the sum of the experiences he says they provided him during his growing years in Los Gatos.
His work, which is being shown at the John Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco, is based on the work ethic his hard-working parents and their parents before them instilled in him. It reflects the personal freedom he has discovered, which was enhanced by his life as a "mountain kid" at his Montevina Road home.
His father, David Middlebrook, a stone sculptor and professor of art at San Jose State University, traveled and lived in many parts of the world with his family because of teaching or art creation opportunities.
Jason was born in Michigan in 1966. Over the next 10 years, the family also lived in Iowa, Kentucky and finally Los Gatos. Before Jason was out of school, his father had taken him to live for months at a time in Italy, South Africa and Australia.
"My Dad's teaching brought us in contact with many people connected with the art world," Jason remembers. "There was a universal acceptance of artists wherever we went which I was exposed to from the time I was a baby."
That acceptance was important to Jason. As a child, he knew he wanted to be a part of the world that gave such support and approval--a world that valued experiences and travel.
When the family moved to Los Gatos, Jason's mother, Alrie, started her own landscaping business. The nature of both his parents' work required space, so the move to the mountain outside of town was a natural one.
Their home on an acre opened to a vast outdoors with thick berry vine underbrush, a canopy of giant oaks and sycamores and endless animal trails through small creek canyons.
It was a 10-year-old's paradise. And with his 5-year-old brother, Aaron, as an accomplice, Jason experienced freedom. There were no rules governing the construction of their forts, no limits to their miniature expeditions, no adults overseeing their jousting tournaments and athletic competitions.
"We didn't have block friends like the kids in town," he says, "so we explored our paradise by ourselves. I think this had a big influence on my art. You learn to work without rules and explore there, too."
Jason's classmates in town were of the neighborhoods and unaccustomed to his kind of life. It took some convincing to get them to venture up to Montevina Road for an overnight.
"There was almost a class thing about being a 'mountain kid,' " Jason recalls. "It was like being from the other side of the tracks."
In high school, this feeling of isolation became more important to Jason. "As adolescents, we loved the removal, but as teenagers, it sucked," he says.
He plunged into athletics. He had inherited a big frame. Over 6'3" in height, he did what had come naturally to his father, grandfather, uncles, cousins and eventually would to his brother: Basketball became his world. "It's a Middlebrook gene," he notes.
As he gained peer acceptance with team status, he distanced himself from his parents, rejecting the creative pursuits they had promoted for him all of his growing years.
Generations of hard work
But work--any and all kinds--took its place. His father, described as a "working maniac" by a contemporary, always had three or four projects going. "And with my mother's landscaping business expanding, she put my brother and me to work maintaining her accounts during the summer all over the south bay and peninsula."
What was forming for Jason, through family example and personal experience, was a strong work ethic. It had been passed down through the generations from the time his maternal and paternal grandfathers were working friends at a Goodyear plant in Michigan. Knowing how to work well was to become the means for his creating many kinds of art as well as the subject of it.
"I find it gratifying to work hard," he reflects. "I find the more you work, the more you have to do. It's a self-propelling thing."
One regret he has now is that he did not pay more attention to creative pursuits in high school and to observing his parents in theirs. But there were other influences.
"My father is a natural builder, gifted in understanding three-dimensional things and totally absorbed in his projects," Jason observes. "My mother is more intuitive and analytical. They struggled with their differences. They battled. They divorced.
"It had an effect on me in understanding relationships," he continues. "Momentum can carry a relationship for awhile, but it eventually wears out. I was blessed to have the better years of their 21 years together."
Jason graduated from Los Gatos High in 1985. His grades kept him from entering a four-year college immediately, but he felt the game of basketball was unfinished business--the mental mastery of it had eluded him. The chance to achieve that was all he wanted from Cabrillo College in Aptos. Until he took his first art course.
"I got so excited about art," he smiles. "I started to do abstract oils in my apartment kitchen, just big color and shapes. I was too immature to do anything else."
Two years later, he was using his basketball ability to interest the athletic director at UC-Santa Cruz in getting him into that school and onto the team. He entered in the fall and established his major as art.
His interests began to collide.
"College athletics are of the institution," he notes. "Art is anti-institution." Nevertheless, he played out his two years but chose art over a third season.
After graduation, Jason's earlier experiences started to give his life momentum.
He wanted to be in a city. He and Kate Needham, a photographer he had met at a photo lab when they were picking up their photos, moved to a loft in Oakland. Jason started graduate school at the San Francisco Art Institute. He found a studio in the city and painted every day after classes and work.
Work for money became very important. Since his parents' divorce, most of his support had to be earned by mustering money in any way possible. He delivered pizza. He landscaped. He bought a truck and moved things.
He painted houses with another artist. From him, Jason learned about another kind of art--thinking or conceptual art. He became absorbed with the approach to the point that his fellow grad students dubbed him "conceptually promiscuous."
"I'd get an idea and dabble with it for a week, then jump to something else," he notes. "I jumped around a lot."
He made contacts. To some, he sent invitations to his shows, to others he sent art. He was learning what every artist must learn if he is to survive--the art of self-promotion.
Whitney competition
The San Francisco art community, small enough to easily meet a lot of people, became a thriving source of influence. There were shows, group sessions to kick around ideas and competitions.
The ultimate in competitions came in 1994. The Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art in New York was holding its annual program. Only 20 artists throughout the United States would be invited to participate. The winners each would be provided with a free studio for a year. Jason was one.
He and Kate left for New York. The program involved nine months of studio practice and two days a week of seminars with artists and art historians from all over the world.
When the program ended, Jason and a Scandinavian artist opened their own studio in East Harlem, where he works now.
"New York is where you have to be," he says, "not to be successful but just to experience it. It is the center of the art world, and things happen at an incredible pace. It helped me to distance myself from my family and be my own person. There are so many people and experiences, a saturation of images and ideas."
One of the contacts Jason made two years ago is the person who invited him to have a show at his gallery in San Francisco. He sent John Berggruen repeated invitations to his shows. He sent him art which Berggruen sold. He sent slides. They communicated and visited.
His persistence paid off. Jason's first one-man show in San Francisco runs through Aug. 17. It consists of oils representing objects of desire, like a magnificent stone mansion or a treasure chest, and sculpture representing reality and hard work, like an oversized hatchet and the word "labor" carved out of wood. All of the pieces seen together are meant to define the work ethic and the artist's relationship to labor and the home.
"Middlebrook addresses his subject well," says Lane Sparkman, associate director at the gallery and the person responsible for organizing the show. "If you look closely, you'll see quite a bit of tongue-in-cheek which makes more sense when you see the work as a whole."
Meanwhile, Jason continues to explore how craft and manual labor are linked to art. He views an artist as a person who is skilled at a craft but capable of going beyond it to create whimsy or to charm, like a "plumber who is a magician." Says Jason: "He has to be a sort of shaman, always creating things people love and adore."
He also has a responsibility. "An artist should feel obligated to give people his perceptions," he says, "because he has a different way of seeing things. For instance, when I see billboards, I see images where most people might view them as text.
"Making art is just a practice of seeing--or a practice of learning how to see," he continues. "Light is a very big part of that."
Because of the distraction of color and light, Jason has painted his East Harlem studio totally white and covers things in the room or turns them backwards so there is no distraction.
"My studio is a shrine of quietness in a city full of stimulants," he says.
This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, July 24, 1996.
©1996 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved