Mind’s Eye
Memphis-based artist Jared Small trades photography for memory to paint his arresting works
By angie toole thompson
A little white house sits on a clouded lot—its tall front windows swathed with small pink roses, its painted wood siding chipped with the badges of age and weather. The house is bizarrely familiar, a place you may have passed a thousand times. And like a mirage, it feels like if you were to reach out and touch its exterior, the house could vanish to vapor before your eyes. The little white house exists solely within a deep, oily landscape painted by artist Jared Small, who reverently conjures in his work the impermanence of memory.
As a kid, Small kicked around Memphis’s many neighborhoods, often tagging along with his mom at her job cleaning houses. He developed a kind of architectural language, clocking the shapes of ornate brackets or a crooked baluster, saving them as interchangeable elements for the outline of his own memory. The houses and all their parts were in various states of decay, he recalls, with buckling porches and rotting paint. He remembers, too, the spirit of these dwellings—that the folks inside were welcoming, that many would grow lush flowers to bloom boldly alongside neglected sidewalks and streets.
Jared Small has painted countless houses like the little white one draped in pink roses. No house is the same—each has distinct features, each seems to hold a different secret. When asked which, if any, of these houses is plucked from his lived experience, Jared explains that he’s looking to convey the truth of a feeling more than the facts of a form. His paintings hit that emotional target with remarkable precision. Small’s meticulous brushwork manifests near-photorealistic brick, plaster, wood, and vine, unveiling structures, flora, and faces that seem totally, viscerally alive. And then, with the air of an exhale, the perimeter of his subjects unravel into abrupt smears and decisive omissions, leaving the viewer with an ineffable feeling, a mix of longing, nostalgia, loss, and gratitude.
“Small’s meticulous brushwork manifests near-photorealistic brick, plaster, wood, and vine, unveiling structures, flora, and faces that seem totally, viscerally alive.”
I interviewed Jared for this piece while in my car outside an old mill-turned-apartment building. I looked to the surrounding mill houses—timeworn but marked with undeniable charm, surely not unlike the ones from Small’s Memphis childhood. We talked about the themes of his work—how memory is incomplete at best. “Imagine you’re at your grandparents house,” he offered, “you’re in a chair, maybe you’re playing with something. There are some things we recall with technicolor accuracy. But try, in your memory, to look to the right or into a corner,” he nudges, the implication hanging midair—“you likely can’t.”
Jared’s work suggests that this sporadic nature of memory is a feature, not a bug. It’s a friendly apparition, a place of freedom as well as mystery. Jared Small’s dense, stirring dreamscapes have been exhibited widely in his native Tennessee, in a major solo exhibition at the Huntsville Museum of Art in Alabama, and are represented by David Lusk Gallery, the renowned art space in Memphis and Nashville. Wherever Jared’s work hangs—from schools to museums to cultural centers—it offers the viewer solidity amidst the uncertain. Or, as Small describes it, a shelter from the storm.
View more of Jared Small’s work at David Lusk Gallery in Memphis, TN, or via jaredsmall.com.
Artwork by Jared Small; courtesy of David Lusk Gallery. This story appears in our Spring 2025 issue.
