David Pierce’s mother was an art teacher, and his great-grandmother used to sit in the Louvre painting copies of the Masters. David himself took the long way around the easel — through sports, a twenty-year business career in Birmingham and a retirement on Alabama’s beaches — before the family talent surfaced in an unexpected medium: driftwood.
Today the Orange Beach-to-Fairhope transplant is known across the Gulf Coast for sculptures, mirrors, consoles and tables built from driftwood he gathers himself — including the tarpon that started it all.
A tarpon that wouldn’t weather
Pierce and his wife Gwen retired to Orange Beach after more than two decades in Birmingham, and the retired executive spent his early beach days on the sports he still plays — golf, pop tennis and pickleball — plus a long-standing woodworking hobby that had produced coffee tables, consoles and dining room tables. Then came the tarpon.
David built an outdoor kitchen at his home and wanted to hang a tarpon he had caught on the wall. A real mounted fish, he reasoned, would not survive the beachside salt and sun. So he decided to build a tarpon out of driftwood instead — and set out in his boat to comb the beaches for raw material.
“I like to select the driftwood pieces myself because I see certain aspects of each element of the piece I’m creating,” he says. “I see the tarpon’s mouth, the neck, and the bill of a pelican, and the shell of a crab or a turtle. People will bring me pieces that they think I can use, but I know what will work in my mind, and when I see the right piece, it just clicks.”
Neighbors noticed
The finished driftwood tarpon went up on the outdoor kitchen wall, and the neighbors took notice. Requests followed, and then a break: a neighbor introduced him to the folks at Duh for Garden and Home in Pensacola, the eclectic home décor shop, which bought one of his sculptures. It sold in one day. Duh became a steady buyer of his driftwood sculptures, and he created pieces for Melanie Martin Interiors in Orange Beach as well.
David and Gwen have since moved to Fairhope, where he continues to create sculptures, mirrors, consoles and tables. He does some consignment work but is doing more commission work these days, with an eye for detail and proportion that customers say shows in every piece.
Why driftwood works
Driftwood is a demanding medium. Every piece has been tumbled, sanded and bleached by waves, sun and salt — which means the artist works with shapes the Gulf has already decided. Pierce’s gift is composition: assembling weathered fragments into the suggestion of a fish, a bird or a turtle, where one curve becomes a jaw and another a fin. The result carries the coast in its material as well as its subject — a fitting medium for a beachside artist whose subject matter is the water itself.
The craft also honors a family line. His great-grandmother copied the Masters in the Louvre; his mother taught art. Three generations later, the same instinct finds its expression not in oils but in wood salvaged from the shoreline — art that had to be found before it could be made.
Coastal Creations
Pierce’s work can be seen online under Coastal Creations by David Pierce on Facebook and Coastal Creations Inc on Instagram, where photographs of his pieces — fish, mirrors and furniture built from Gulf driftwood — reach collectors well beyond Fairhope. For homeowners along the coast, the appeal is obvious: sculpture made from local material, built by hand, one piece at a time.
His great-grandmother would be proud. It just took a retired businessman, a caught tarpon and a boatload of beachcombing to bring the family talent out into the open.