Back and forth a few times on that wide wet street (raining again), circling parking lots, getting out of the way of countless Ford F-150s, chasing street names that change east to west. Finally I find the numbers outside a high-rise by the airport, follow the "P" into the innocuous pale garage, "P" my car up a level, walk down, cross a paved walk and push, then pull, a glass door. An old guard at a desk says something, but I'm not sure what at first, until I see another set of glass doors to my right. He has greeted me with the words "Welcome to the museum." It is much more like entering a bank.

The exhibit opened today; small works by an adept California Impressionist, the victim of an incapacitating automobile accident who had lots of time on his hands afterward. He painted the coast near Monterey and up to San Jose, sometimes further, over and over again, demarcating familiar place names on board and paper. You can see the seasons and the years change, you know old from new. The hues range from purple to green to gold, as they do here in California. The foreground is flowers or grasses or rocks, a twisted cypress or a crashing wave in the middle. The horizon alters from hazy to crisp as the edge of a dime.

This is my favorite kind of art, even though it makes me furious. William Wendt got me hooked with a giant canvas at LACMA. He painted in full detail what lies beneath the last century of incorrigible growth. It isn't just that the past has been recorded so accessibly (and then used to thwart its own subject). It is that one cannot really access it at all. What is there is so strikingly realistic but unreal, so frustratingly close to what we know but so far from where we actually live.

There's a 24-inch painting by Wendt available at a gallery in Laguna Beach, sort of where I live, but it's $145, 000. That's a good $400,000 cheaper than the average price of a house out here. Somebody loan me the money.