A singed eyebrow or two did nothing to extinguish Mr. Neeley’s enthusiasm for jewelry. By age 14, he was participating in art shows across Colorado, including one in Telluride, where the actress Daryl Hannah bought a piece from his first collection.
It was around this time, in the late 1990s, when Mr. Neeley paid his first visit to the Tucson gem shows and met Mr. Avery, the lapidary, a fellow Coloradan.
In Tucson early this year, Mr. Avery reminisced with Mr. Neeley about that first encounter, when the young rock hound purchased an aquamarine. “I remember your father was with you,” Mr. Avery recalled. “You picked the least expensive piece that I had, but it was really beautiful, and of course, you gravitated right to it.”
Mr. Neeley’s appreciation for colored stones — from the hard stones of his Colorado youth to the pearls and fine faceted tourmalines, sapphires and rubies that distinguish his jewelry today — only deepened at the Gemological Institute of America, where he earned a graduate gemologist degree in 2003.
His real-world training, however, took place in Florence, Italy, where he moved in 2004 to study design and advanced jewelry techniques at Le Arti Orafe, one of Europe’s top goldsmithing institutions. In January 2005, Mr. Neeley began to apprentice under the master goldsmith Giò Carbone, the school’s founder. “Adam was an out-of-the-ordinary student, meticulous, curious, creative,” Mr. Carbone wrote in an email.
Mr. Neeley said that Mr. Carbone taught him to be painstaking about his finishing techniques. He also inspired him to consider custom-making his own gold alloys. “In the U.S., we usually buy our alloys from a big supplier,” Mr. Neeley said. “It’s pre-mixed yellow gold. And they have maybe one or two shades, but that’s about it. In Europe, they’re usually alloying themselves.”
