Visiting the Oakland Museum of California is a bit like solo rock climbing. There are three levels of California stuff on display set out in cave-like concrete exhibition halls. And on a weekend you will almost certainly find yourself alone. In search of the exhibit "Plant Portraits". I chose Level 3 "ART." I knew the special exhibition would be in the back of the gallery so kept a steady pace through the past few decades of the permanent collection but got stuck on a few landscapes near the turn of the century. Canvases like Henry Joseph Breuer's "In Mission Canyon Santa Barbara 1902" make me want to get out of town. (Of course, this canyon may now be town.) I made my way to the special gallery at the back and, to my surprise, was in a small, darkish room with "The Art of Vivika and Otto Heino." Not plant portraits but Arts-and-Crafts inspired pottery.

Vivika and Otto Heino were a wife-and-husband team who practiced pottery together for forty-five years and participated in the California craft scene of the 1950s. They met when, after returning from World War II, Otto signed up for a pottery class with Vivika who had a studio across from his family's New Hampshire dairy farm. After living on both the East and West Coasts, they settled in Ojai, California and named their studio "The Pottery." Photographs of Otto at the wheel and Otto stoking the wood-fired kiln after Vivika's death in 1995 hang on the walls. (You can visit Otto at http://www.ottospottery.com .)

For me the show was more about lifestyle and a California lost than pots—the Oakland Museum sets me up for nostalgia. I grew up on the North Coast and most of the adults in my life were craftspeople. I expected the visitors' comment book to reflect my sentiment but found that visitors were moved by the objects themselves. "What up. Cool pots." "We're French and we're very impressed by your work." "Thank you for introducing so much excitement in my life!" Finally, the somewhat equivocal "The "Olive tile" is so exquisite that it almost brought me to tears." prompted me to take a closer look. "Olive tile"—a slab tile with impression of olive branches and fruit—did not have me weeping. But I kept looking for excitement and decided I was close enough when I found a palm-sized vase with a fleshy orifice and an iron-blue brush stroke on which seems to hang a copper-red human heart. A good-looking object that has only happened once. There is something moving about that.

[Note: Go to Level 1 "NATURAL SCIENCE" to see "Plant Portraits: The California Legacy of A.R. Valentien." Albert R. Valentien was an Arts and Crafts ceramic decorator who decided on a whim to enter the world of plant illustration. California, with its floral diversity and year-round blooms, beckoned. In 1908 he was commissioned to paint the wildflowers of the state. By 1918 he had completed 1500 "portraits"—he had no botanical training. I did the math and that is one painting every two and a half days—this while on one long road trip in a very early automobile over a young and untried highway system. If you are interested in obsessions, you might want to see the show.]