When they are dried, he remounts the bowls on the lathe and sands the wood, getting it down to a quarter of an inch thick. Afterward he brushes on a top-secret resin that gives the bowls their glass-like sheen. Oftentimes, he says, he finds himself lost in a zone while he’s working. “I’ll catch myself and realize that my hands are just working and that I have no idea what I’ve been doing for the past few hours,” he says.

Moulthrop gets distinct pleasure from working with the wood. Different trees have different personalities. White pines are soft and malleable. Oak and persimmon are hard and ornery. Ashleaf maple is his favorite, “brightly colored, dramatically patterned, and fun to work with,” he says.

As a child and a teenager, Philip had little interest in his father’s wood turning. “I thought it was just one of those things that parents did,” he says. After a short stint in Vietnam, Philip got his law degree and joined a firm.

One summer in the late 1980s, when his law firm went to a four-day workweek, Moulthrop spent his free day at the lathe. He eventually asked for more days off, gradually whittling down his lawyering days until there were none left. “I fell in love with [wood turning] and realized I could make a living at it,” he says.
Since then his works have been displayed in the White House and in galleries across the world. His pieces command prices ranging from $250 for the smaller bowls (three inches in diameter) to $30,000 for the largest ones (thirty-six inches in diameter).

The wood shavings don’t fall far from the lathe. Philip’s son, Matt, thirty-two, has recently entered the family business, something he’s been involved in for most of his life. (As a toddler, Matt was famously photographed peering out from within one of Edward’s larger creations.) Toward the end of Edward’s life, when palsy and failing eyesight made working difficult, Matt learned how to finish his grandfather’s bowls. He now makes his own and frequently does shows with his father.

But like Philip, Matt was initially unsure that he wanted to be a woodturner. After graduating from the University of Georgia, he got his MBA at Georgia Tech. “I thought I wanted to work in finance,” he says. “I’m grateful to be able to do this for a living.”

For more information on Moulthrop's bowls, go to moulthropstudios.com