When I was young I envisioned myself as a miniature person--a toy figure standing only a few inches tall. Man-made objects like pillows were transformed into massive geological landmarks. I turned my room into a vast, all-surrounding, natural landscape. In an attempt to explore this frontier, I would act out my immediate desires of adventure and power.

I am reexamining that concept within my work. My drawings and paintings meld traditional realism with an adolescent point of view. They immediately evoke the visual scale of the 1957 movie The Incredible Shrinking Man, a story about a toy sized man who struggles to stay alive. With this film acting as a visual foundation, I focus on concepts of idealism from both a childhood and adult perspective. Using domestic imagery straight from the colorful backgrounds of Tom and Jerry and other media I am able to quickly engage a contemporary audience. My goal is to conjure up a sense of nostalgia so that I can thoroughly narrate my stories about human nature.

By distorting the scale in my work, figures have to interact with the domestic environment in unfamiliar ways and must rely on their basic instincts to survive. The home, an artificial human design, is the world in which they live. We take for granted the kind of impact we have on nature, but our views can change when we subtly adjust our scope of the world. The world we build is consequently the world we must live in.

web site: www.rickycolson.com