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 brown warmth in the grey separates and bleeds down to form something like a horizon.
“I’ve been working a lot with heavy skies,” he said. “It symbolizes twilight to me, and also the foreboding of what’s in store, or a distant storm passing away.”
Smith’s exhibit of two dozen watercolor prints, titled “Sky-Water-Earth,” is on display through September at the Dance Palace. His paintings show shifting horizons, expansive seas, wide skies, and the play and color mimicry between the two.
His focus on watercolor is recent. Most of his career involved lithographs, silverpoints, mixed-media drawings, pastels, and monotypes. He grew up taking art classes from the Oakland Rec Department, and his mother, an artist and art teacher, would save paper from the butcher shop for him to use. At Oakland’s Skyline High School, an art teacher introduced him to etching, and he had an hour each day to work in an empty art room. His work led to a scholarship to California College of the Arts, and he continued in Paris at Atelier 17. Later, in San Francisco, he studied mezzotint with the master Hamaguchi. He shows twice a year in the Point Reyes Open Studios.
Now far from the process-oriented techniques of his etching days, Smith is embracing the immediacy and spontaneity of watercolor. Several years ago, he began swimming the backstroke weekly in an outdoor pool. “I’m looking up at the sky, and I’m feeling the water supporting me,” he said. “Water has become an increasingly important element to me. It’s been a focal point, just kind of a spiritual practice for me.”
Gary Smith’s exhibit shows during regular hours at the Dance Palace Community Center through September. A reception takes place from 2 to 4 p.m. on Sunday, Sept. 27. Caitlin Sullivan is the Dance Palace’s Administrative Coordinator. She lives in Inverness Park.
Reprint with permission from the Point Reyes Light