According to Ken Wells, it’s a small world after all.

The local artist is exhibiting a collection of his miniature watercolour paintings at the Cunliffe House Gallery.

The paintings are predominantly landscapes and approximately one-and-a -half inches by two inches in size.

Life on a Thumbnail, as he is calling the exhibit, takes a little look at the big picture.

“You can get a lot into a small watercolour and sometimes you can suggest things you’re not really sure are there or not,” Wells said.

He has been painting for more than 20 years and enjoyed a successful career as a scenic artist in the B.C. film industry before retiring to Kamloops a few years ago.

He said painting on a such a small scale is just a different view of the world and it invites others to pay more attention to an image.

A lot of people, he added, don’t really look at art subjectively and he hopes this exhibit will inspire them use their own eyes and ears to understand the world around them.

“A lot of people, I’ve found, being an artist and a musician, won’t or cannot make a decision about anything they see and they wait for somebody else to make a decision and then they jump on that because they don’t trust their own senses,” Wells said.

By having to intentionally take a closer look at a small image, he hopes people will naturally come to their own conclusions about his art.

Although he’s used to painting on a more life-size scale, Wells said painting small works was not a difficult transition.

In fact, he noted, it made it easier to make more paintings because he could work on more than one at a time.

“I paint big and I paint small,” he said.

“I don’t think one is easier or more difficult than the other . . . It’s just a different way of looking at the world.”

Life on a Thumbnail is on exhibit at the Cunliffe House Gallery, 262 Lorne St., until Wednesday.