(thrilling music) (thrilling music continues) (thrilling music continues) - I don't get tired of coming out here.

I can be working around the house, perhaps in something I'm not enjoying doing, or could be working out in the studio, getting a little stale, and I'll look outside and the wind's right, and I go, "I think I'm gonna go out to the beach for an hour."

And so I can walk out to the end of my dock, take my cell phone with me and a bottle of water and be at the beach in 10 minutes, take a nice walk, do a little beachcombing, a little shelling, back in the skiff and back at whatever I was doing in an hour's time, so it's very convenient.

(thrilling music) (shells clack) Good shelling right here.

(thrilling music) (thrilling music continues) I like to start with one nice shell and work from there.

(shells clack) I use one larger shell and two or three smaller shells, so I pick out the biggest one and then kinda build around that.

It's not rocket science, that's for sure.

(shells clack) That's a nice one.

That looks pretty good.

And there's a candle.

The beginnings of a candle.

Half the people that buy the candles don't light them ever.

I really liked living next to the ocean.

Spent a lot of time on the ocean in my years as a boat captain.

When you're walking out on that beach and everything is drowned out by the sound of the waves crashing right next to you, it's good thinking time, you know?

Then I might pick something up off the beach that has a nice shape to it that I like and I think, "Eh, that might look good in clay," and I've done that many times, so that alone's an inspiration.

I just like living in a place that's clean and quiet, and this is it.

(graceful music) (graceful music continues) Okay, another day.

(graceful music) Who put that there?

(laughs) The last course I took in school to graduate was a ceramics course that a friend of mine had taken and recommended, and so I took it, and it was really the only course I took in my four years of school that I got a legitimate A in, and this was during the Vietnam War and a lot of professors were handing out A's in protest, so I did learn a little bit that was working on a wheel.

All the stuff I do is hand-built, and so I don't work on a wheel at all.

I love it, I enjoyed it, and did get an A in it, still have a few of the pieces that I made in that class, but I have a lot more flexibility for what I wanna do.

I got started making the globes, and that was my incentive for about 10 years of work, and that all had to be hand-built.

I was captaining boats at the time and that gave me large blocks of time in the off-season to play with clay, and so that was a boon.

I worked several months in the winter down in the Caribbean, and the summer months up in the Chesapeake, Upper Chesapeake and New England, Maine, and so I had large blocks of time to play with and I think that was instrumental in getting, you know, figuring it out, and it's just after about 25 years that I really feel like I've getting close to mastering my end of it, anyway.

Found some large oysters on the beach and thought they were big enough to be a little bowl of some sort for holding peanuts or whatever, and so I took an impression of the inside of them and I eventually came down to this with smaller oysters that I can attach to the platter form, and then I'll glaze it and fire it, do a glaze fire on it to about 2,200 degrees.

- David is probably one of the most creative and inventive artists, and one of the things that I really like to show you about David is that his intellectual side is as well as the artistic.

This is an amazing piece.

This globe represents the renascent world.

If we don't take care of our world, this is what it's gonna look like, and there's one blue spot on this globe that says "hope."

This is all separate pieces put together on this globe.

Quite the process.

- I make globes the way they've made globes since they started making them.

The first globes were made out of, I guess, paper that they would bend over a sphere, and they still make globes that way today.

Each of these gores has 45 degrees longitude in it, which adds up to 360, and they're all numbered, and they, of course, all fit together, and I've had them in order here so that I can work them next to each other, make sure that everything's gonna fit once the tiles are fired, finished, fired, and put over top of the foam base that I make for it.

(poised music) (poised music continues) Your choices in ceramics are almost unlimited 'cause the clay, you know, the material you're using is so flexible.

Start with the interior and glaze the background, and then I start, then I move from there to the interior of each oyster, that's a different glaze, and then I do the rim in a white glaze.

You never know.

That's the beauty of, that's one of the things I like about clay is that, you know, you put it in here and you turn the heat on, and sometimes I'll pull something out that's beautiful.

Next time, it'll be cracked, but what a great lesson in dealing with disappointment.

I learned that early on in clay, you know?

If you can't deal with disappointment, you don't have any business being in clay business.

Other artwork, you can paint it, you can look at it, you can maybe, you know, repaint part of it if you want to, but this is done.

Once it's fired, it's finished.

(inspiring music) I brought my mom and my aunts down here one year and took 'em out to the beach, and my aunt from Indiana who doesn't see many beaches was just asking, you know, "Now, B, what are we looking for out here?"

She wanted a definite, you know, answer of what there was, and my mom just looked at her and said, "June, anything of interest."

(inspiring music) And so that's pretty much my guiding thing on the beach is anything of interest, and there's incredible stuff out there.

(inspiring music) (inspiring music continues) (no audio) (no audio)