Recap: artist loves his colorful works - Yazzy at www.williamverdult.com

An encounter with Ben Darby's paintings conjures up one of the most famous lines from William's Wordsworth's poetry: The Child is father of the Man. Finger puppets and Tonka trucks are part of his repertoire of imagery. So are cartoon elephants and toy guns.

But his work is no heavily idealized homage to childhood. Objects, toys and everything else become elements in scenes that hover between still life and landscape, abstract design and symbolic icon.

The Tonka trucks form a temple. Finger puppets sprout from the tips of bananas, still on the trees, in a deftly rendered tropical scene.

Darby's multifaceted output mingles influences as disparate as 1960s pop and the Zen strain in Northwest moderns like Morris Graves and Mark Tobey. He's created mandalas using hair dryers and guns as icons. In landscapes with waterfalls, the falls themselves consist of forks, knives and spoons done in silvery aquatic hues.

“These things lie around and I let them marinate in my mind,” says Darby, surrounded by the paintings in his living room. “I love what chance does to my work, and then I can put control on it afterward.”

Darby, now 38, moved here with his wife, Catherine Martin Darby, and their their son, Basil, about two years ago from Kona, Hawaii. They now have a second son, Bryce, age 1.

San Diego County is familiar territory. He grew up in Cardiff and Encinitas. Then, a couple of years after finishing high school, Darby left to pursue a B.F.A. in art in Seattle, at the small Cornish College of the Arts.

That proved to be a good decision.

“Seattle was a great place for new artists,” Darby recalls. “And Cornish was the right kind of school for me.”

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