Jared Small’s oil on Plexi glass paintings catch our attention with their technicalprowess and keep us engaged with their intimacy and depth of emotion. A self-taught artist, Small’s subject matter includes dilapidated houses, flowers and portraits. With super smooth surfaces and sumptuous paint handling, he offers convincingly realistic depictions and then disrupts our suspension of disbelief as the images dissolve into dripping paint around the edges. It is a captivating way to remind us that what we are looking at is illusion, not the real thing. It’s easy to be seduced by his alchemy and earnest depictions. His portraiture is as tender as it is real. He finds beauty in the traditional subject of fresh flowers and in the unexpected elegance of run-down houses, sometimes pairing the two. We absorb the meaning: there’s beauty and loss everywhere. An unflinching painter of what sustains his interest, Small gives us the whole package: magically life-like details that represent a multitude of truths as he sees them.Jared Small is a native Memphian. He attended Overton High School and the University of Memphis, and has participated in numerous exhibitions in Tennessee, and a major solo exhibition at the Huntsville Museum of Art. His work is in the collections of Butler Snow Law Firm, Memphis; Commercial Bank and Trust, Memphis; Double H Farms, CT; Duke Aesthetic Center, Durham NC; Duncan Williams Inc, Memphis; First Bank, Nashville; Fidelity Investments, Raleigh, NC; HLM Venture Capital, San Francisco; Huntsville Museum of Art, Huntsville, AL: Jones Clinic, Memphis & New Albany MS; LeBonheur Children’s Hospital, Memphis; M2M, Mobile Mercer Capital, Memphis; Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis; Renasant Bank, Memphis; NSA Headquarters, Collierville, TN; Music City Center, Nashville; New Media Strategies, Arlington, VA; Pietrangelo Cook Law Firm, Memphis; Regions Insurance Headquarters, Memphis; St Mary’s Episcopal School, Memphis; and Suntrust Bank Memphis, Headquarters.