Jeff Middleton was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1964. He
has had an interest in art from childhood, and took classes
at the Portland Art School while growing up. His mother is
a freelance artist in Portland and his father was an architect
and a photographer. He initially majored in art while attending
Portland State University, but then switched to a science
major with an emphasis on public health. He has always enjoyed
drawing, and as a teenager drew endless pages of cartoons,
occasionally doing freelance pieces. (While attending Portland
State he earned his living driving buses for Tri-Met, Portland’s
bus system. He was the youngest driver when he started at
age 21.)
He obtained his Masters in Information and Library Science
in 1997 here at the University of Arizona. While earning
that degree he worked in the Arizona Health Sciences Library
as a student on the Information Services desk. He then worked
for three years (1998-2000) in the former Information Technology
Services Department in this library. During this time he
created illustrations for “The Doctor's (and other
health care practitioners) Names List”, a web site
maintained by another AHSL librarian, Mari Stoddard.
In 2000 he moved to the University of Massachusetts at Amherst,
and while there he began to work as a staff artist for Merriam-Webster
in Springfield Massachusetts in 2001. His assignment was to
do illustrations for the 11th Collegiate Dictionary, published
in 2003. Jeff did approximately a third of the illustrations,
in some cases updating previously existing illustrations,
and in some cases preparing completely new illustrations.
He illustrates regularly for Seed Magazine.
He says his work for Seed is “a lot of fun, with quite
a bit of variety.” He also has upcoming illustration
projects for the publishers Crown (a division of Random House)
and Scribner’s. He was a featured speaker at the New
York Chapter of the American Institute of Graphic Arts in
2003.
When not illustrating or drawing, Jeff works as a librarian
at the Central Arizona College in Coolidge, a job he began
in 2002. Here Jeff has recently been combining both of his
illustrating and librarian skills, revamping the library website's
look and online functionality. Jeff is“glad to get back
to Tucson from Massachusetts, to be back in the warm climate
and cheerful sunshine.”
The Jeff Middleton Exhibit will run from June 16 - July 31
2004.
