Artists
Colin Middleton
Colin Middleton, landscape, figure and surrealist painter was born at 48 Victoria Gardens, Belfast, the son of a damask designer. Apprenticed to his father’s firm he attended Belfast College of Art and in 1932 won the Royal Dublin Society’s Taylor Scholarship.
Middleton once claimed that he was the only Surrealist painter working in Ireland in the 1930’s. Initially he experimented with a number of styles, including a lyrical semi-abstraction and geometric abstraction. In 1938 he exhibited for the first time with the RHA and continued to do so annually until 1954.
Belfast Museum and Art Gallery held a Middleton exhibition at Stranmilis in 1943 and his work appeared regularly in Dublin –mainly at the Grafton Gallery and the Irish Exhibition of Living Art- in the 1950’s and 1960’s. From the 1950’s his work was regularly exhibited outside Ireland.
On an exhibition of paintings 1942-’49 at the Waddington Galleries, the Dublin magazine wrote that his work was valued for ‘it’s superb technical spirit, it’s surrealist clarity, it’s imaginative and semi-abstract invention’. Remarking that they found him at times too remote and detached the writer noted that he had also developed ‘another approach and another style, direct, dynamic and vital. From being remote and abstract he has become passionately human..’ On a retrospective,1939-’54, held by Waddington’s in 1955 the same magazine commented; ‘Apart from the brilliance of his paint, he has one rare quality in his inexhaustible capacity for wonder’.
In 1954 he began a sixteen year period as a teacher of art, initially part-time at the Belfast College of Art and then, from 1955-’61, at Coleraine Technical School. He was head of the Art Department at Friend’s School, Lisburn, 1961-’70. Throughout his teaching career he continued to exhibit in Belfast, Dublin and London and, in 1955, at the Royal Academy.
His paintings had not been seen at the Royal Hibernian Academy 1955-’67 inclusive but he resumed exhibiting annually until the year of his death. In 1969, he year he was awarded the MBE he was appointed an associate and full membership the following year.In 1976 a major retrospective, consisting of almost 300 works was organised by the Arts Councils north and south and held at the Ulster Museum and the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin.
Also a musician and poet – he was a life-long friend of John Hewitt- Middleton lived in Bangor, at 6 Victoria Road, from 1953. He died, aged 73, in December 1983.
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