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Within the first few minutes of a conversation, Rob Williams is talking about his 4-year-old son. He watches his son with a sense of awe. He never thought he would become a parent, but now that he has, Williams' son has become his muse and the inspiration for much of his recent artwork.

"Between my son and getting a puppy, there is so much youth around here," he said. "I'm learning to see through their eyes and not take life so seriously."

Williams' paintings always have been full of bright color, but now they also carry a message about more than color and design.

A large painting titled "101 Green Peas" is an explanation of lesson about perception that he learned from his son. To one side, what at first appears to be a red color study is a small square full of green circles.

"My perception of the peas is 'Is this all the peas I get? I want more peas.'" he said. "My son looks at it and he thinks, 'I have to eat all these peas?'"

The message is similar in Williams' piece, "A child's eyes."

The two-piece series matches two square panels of concentric squares painted on a prepared surface of textured Gesso. The squares are made of the same color combinations in different orders, a design informed by Williams' work as a graphic artist. The texture is meant to imply busy-ness, Williams said. "Children always have something going on, and it's always fun."

As he painted, he thought of his son.

"There is nothing bad in his life," he said. "How, as adults, do we get that back?

"Life becomes so mundane. It turns into a game of making money for the end of the month. When did I forget how fun it was just to go out and play in the snow?"

Williams is following his own advice by being more playful on canvas.

He recently finished a series of paintings of flowers in a pot. The stems are wiry, and the composition is about line and texture, but the images are unusually figurative compared with Williams' earlier work.

The series of three paintings is called "Botanical Garden 1, 2 and 3."

"It's about getting spring fever," he said. "This time of year, you look outside, and you are ready to grow things, but there is still snow on the ground. Instead, I decided to draw some flowers."

His goal with the fun paintings is to get something on people's walls that makes them look at their situation in a different way, he said, much as his own perspective has changed.

The painting "Plight of the Dandelion" is a diptych painted more in his traditional graphic, conceptual style using colors and line rather than actual imagery. The message is in the title.

"Everyone has these dandelions, and they want to kill them," he said. "But I think they're pretty flowers. They are just trying to live their life. I see them as a metaphor for the common man, which is what I consider myself. I'm just an average guy, and painting is my language.

"The world is so judgmental, and that's what this painting is about."