SACRAMENTO

MANY people would consider State Highway 160 to be a why-bother sort of a landscape, an isolated and unremarkable byway atop a levee along the Sacramento River in which the lone landmarks include a ramshackle bait and tackle shop and rusty pipes from an old sugar beet factory.

But for the artist Wayne Thiebaud, whose paintings luxuriate in the commonplace  be it his signature bakeshop-window cakes and Boston cream pies or a roast chicken twirling on a rotisserie  the Sacramento Delta is fertile ground. Home ground.

“Aren’t the colors marvelous?” he asked one afternoon recently, as if seeing this watery Netherland-like country outside Sacramento for the first time. He will often come here with his artist friends, setting up his French painting easel along the levee. “The river changes almost constantly, from black to brown to coffee color to green to blue,” he said. An hour passed; the water shimmered silver. “It helps fortify your focus,” he observed. John Singer Sargent, he added, “was probably blessed with a photographic memory. But with me, it’s about remembrance  sketching certain types of reflected patterns, different kinds of lighting, then conjuring it up with your memory and imagination.”

Mr. Thiebaud’s imagined delta landscapes  where azure furrows meld with emerald levees, violet fields and confetti orchards and a river with phosphorescent banks flowing dizzily in several directions  are among the 75 paintings and drawings to be featured in “Homecoming,” a retrospective at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, the city he has called home since the 1950s. The exhibit, on view from Oct. 10 through Nov. 28, coincides with the opening of a 125,000-square-foot wing, designed by Charles Gwathmey and Gwathmey Siegel Associates, that nearly quadruples the museum’s gallery space.