In the quiet of his Inverness Ridge home, sunlight shines through Gary Smith’s studio window onto a blank piece of watercolor paper. He dips a squirrel-hair mop brush into water, then pulls together red-brown and blue paints made from ground piemontite and blue apatite minerals to make a beautiful gray.
He carefully works his way back and forth, sweeping down the coarsely textured paper. The pigment begins to crawl on the page; slowly, the…