He's only been practicing his art for five years, insists that he is an amateur, and he never gets paid for his pieces.  But the opportunity to use Onset Beach as his canvas and the thank-yous he receives from admirers of his work suffice for Rodney Johnson.

"I do my own thing, as long as it makes somebody happy, that's all I want to know," said Johnson, a Brockton native who travels to decorate the beach with his sculptures as often as the weather allows.  "I get paid a lot, it's called thank yous."

Johnson first started sculpting on Revere Beach, after he noticed a dad teaching his daughter how to sculpt a dragon and decided to try it himself.

His first project (and his biggest) was a killer whale.  The whale's fin was almost five-foot-eight-inches tall, and the body was four-feet wide.  But the most attractive feature was that he dug out a pit so that people could go underneath and pat the whale's belly.

"Everybody on the beach was going there and taking pictures," he said.  He was hooked.

But he soon realized that he wasn't interested in competitions.

"I realized, why should I challenge other people?  We all should be on the beach making something, we should all be on the beach looking at each others' work," he said.

So, he's made it his mission to just go out, sculpt, and teach.

"I swore I wouldn't do another competition," he resolved.  "I do it for the people on the beach, I'm from old school, beatnik, hippie type," he said, laughing.

He said that he chose Onset because he had fond memories of visiting the beach after playing with his former band, Jim Danny and the Rescuers, at the Golden Clef.

"We used to go the beach after the gig was over, and I always remembered that I had a good time there and that the people were nice," he said.

So he decided to give back.

I'm doing this stuff and helping everybody to enjoy the beach," he said.  "I have fun with everybody - from the children right up to the elderly people."

He frequently challenges people to join him in his sculpting or to guess what he's designing.  And he's always willing to chat..."my wife tells me I talk so much when we go shopping that I'm trying to become mayor of the supermarket."

And he is always on the lookout to recruit the next artist to continue to decorate the beach.

"I'm not no pro, I'm just a dad. If I can do it, anybody else can do it," Johnson insists. "God gave me a talent, a talent that I didn't know about, and I'm using it, and it makes people happy.... Now if I could stop the kids from stomping on [my sculptures] when I leave."