Gray Matthews

@grayhiker.bsky.social

510 Followers 150 Following

Radical contemplative, long artist, retired educator, grandfather, vigilant wonderer, living deliberately in deadening times

Film poster for Evil Does Not Exist. A man peers across a pond to see two figures, a girl and a deer, on the other shore surrounded by trees and mist.
President Trump leaving his seat and interview with Christine Welker on Face the Nation. John Deere tractor in the background.
Black box at top with book title and author’s name. Lighter image below is difficult to identify but appears to be a barren strip of deserted land, beach or desert, a photo out of focus, disorienting our perception.
Actor Keith Ledger in clown makeup in a holding cell as the character Joker in The Dark Knight (2008).
Dark, foreboding skies above a man in a red hat with a whip as he drives a horse-drawn circus wagon with red curtains and an elephant inside toward the US Capitol. A dark bird of prey sits in a dark tree in the upper left hand corner. Ominous, prophetic image from Oct 2024 cover of The Atlantic magazine.
Dark multicolored ink-cloud exploding over island in ocean, book cover for Julietta Singh’s Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and decolonial entanglements (2018).
Evergreen trees and mist. Cover for Spanish edition of Byung-Chul Han’s On God: Thinking with Simone Weil
Black and white page of lyrics to the song “The Bitter Earth."
Orange, black & white cover of the 1990 book, We Make the World by Walking, with its two authors facing each other: Myles Horton on the left, Paulo Freire on the right. The title-phrase is spoken by Freire on page 6 and is attributed to a poetic proverb by Spanish poet, Antonio Machado.
Painting of King Midas by Andrea Vaccaro, 1670 CE. The king has his back to the viewer, his gaze slanted downward in melancholy, unhappy that Everything he touched turned to gold. Source:https://www.worldhistory.org/image/2142/king-midas/
Poem entitled “The Answer” by Robinson Jeffers from: The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers (Stanford, 2001, 522).
cover of Attensity! A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement by the Friends of Attention published by Crown in January 2026
Cover image of Gary Snyder’s 1980 The Real Work: image of a wooden post standing atop a large stone with their joined relation bathed in light.
Image of a long quote from Denise Levertov from her New & Selected Essays (1992, page 144).
Cover image for book entitled “Giving Up is Unforgivable: A Manual for Keeping a Democracy,” by Joyce Vance (October 2025).
Image of 2014 book cover for The Lincoln-Douglas Debates, edited by Rodney O. Davis and Douglas L. Wilson.
Book cover image of men and women who are Creek Indians playing a social ball game together as they surround a tall pole with an animal skull on top of it.
Drawn image of a woman with grey hair, white blouse, pearl necklace, with blue background. Image of Hannah Arendt.
A grove of beech trees on a leaf covered hill slanting up to a horizon of sky. Most of the trees are grey-white in color with leaves in various autumn colors of green, yellow, orange, brown, red. The viewer may feel as if she is in the middle of scene as she walks among the trees in serene relation.
an unclothed man sitting on a large multicolored rock is mesmerized by a scroll on the ground that he bends over to study and make calculations with a compass with darkness all around him.
Girl in a dress, apron, and bonnet holding a basket of cut flowers from laurel bushes behind her along large stones. Bright sky with clouds above; grasses, weeds, wildflowers below. Her face is partly shadowed as she looks off to her right
Starlit night with a young girl in a wooden boat with light pastel rainbow colored scarves blowing in the breeze.
A woman and man seated at a table, their eyes focused on nothing in particular, sadly pensive, almost at a loss at what to say about this world at the present moment.
A small room in a house that is filled with a giant green apple. A window in the wall on the left looks out to the sea, with the light coming into the room to cast the apple’s shadow on the ceiling and opposite wall.
Double negative photo of a house in the distance with the top of large tree hanging upside down from the sky over the house, with bare branches-like-roots extending through the ground under the house. Nearest to the viewer is a clump of sod from behind which we view the black and white scene.
serene alpine lake with mountains in the background with trees and a few buildings below them at the shore of a lake reflecting sky and landscape. Nearest is a tree on the left side as we gaze upon the scene from the opposite shore. Impressionistic colors: blues, greens, yellows in varying shades. Peaceful.
An imprisoned man in a dark chamber is seated with his hands together on his knees, looks up at a nurse, aglow in a red dress, who holds a candle in her right hand while she tenderly touches his head with her left hand in attentive care.
Anishinaabe painter Roy Thomas [1949-2004] depicts humans and nonhumans in a world canoe, each holding white-tipped paintbrushes contributing to a painting behind them.
lower third of painting of wheat field in greens and yellows with darkening blue sky above with white clouds.
Ten people in a dark room at night attending a scientific experiment on a bird, but only one—a young girl—is expressing any serious ethical concern. The girl is in the lower center, closest to the light so we see her full expression of concern.
Two poets on a cliff overlooking mountains and cloud-covered valleys as they contemplate the cosmos in the present moment. A poem is written on the right side onto the painting by Shih T’ao about a city, meanwhile, being abandoned. Painted in 1701.
a sculpture called “Joy” by artist Mary Frank (1979). It looks like the back of a sanded sand dollar embedded with a winged woman on her knees with folded arms facing a small cloud in relief.
An artistic view above the clouds. The color white takes up 3/4s of the image, above which is a yellow-green sunlit to blue sky at the top.
painting of pine trees on six panel fabric screen with some trees visible but most hidden by fog or distance. Very quiet scene painted by Tohaku in 1610.
Vermeer 1662 painting of a woman opening a window with her right hand while she readies a water pitcher with her left hand.
painting called “Guernica" (1937) by Pablo Picasso