Exhibition: Rest – Works by Franklin Matthews

On view throughout June in Taliaferro Hall Gallery
Open: Monday-Friday 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Please call the Office before visiting to make sure the hall is open. (904) 356-5507

Franklin Matthews’ exhibition Rest invites the viewer to slow down—visually, emotionally, and even spiritually. Rendered entirely in grayscale, these intricate ink drawings ask us to pause and dwell in the quiet between tones. Each scene, whether a storm over water or a stand of trees dissolving into the sky, is made of thousands of tiny dots—deliberate, meditative marks that draw the eye to what matters by stripping away what doesn’t.

A fifth-generation Northeasterner from Jacksonville, he has spent his life listening to the land that shaped him. After studying at the Florida School of the Arts and the Atlanta College of Art, Matthews returned home, seeking not the rush of the fine art world but the rootedness of family, community, and place. His careers in education and law enforcement have only deepened this grounding, giving him a layered understanding of people and the places they inhabit.

His drawings reflect this patient observation. There’s a kind of reverence in the restraint—an honoring of the land not through spectacle, but through stillness. The absence of color does not flatten these works; instead, it opens a contemplative space where the viewer can notice subtle details: the shift of light, the shape of a shoreline, the way trees gather like memory.

Matthews’ art, like the summer theme itself, is a call to rest—not as escape, but as a return. To the land. To what lasts. To the things that form us when we take the time to see them.