A New Breed of Fish

I've recently been corresponding with a well known collector about doing a couple of blowfish that specifically reflect my "style." The blowfish is a shape I'm pretty comfortable with. I've probably made well over a hundred of them, and have developed a specific set of lines, contours and ratios that I try to incorporate in each piece.

There is something of a controversy over the name "blowfish." For Lars, the moniker refers to a bent Scoop with teardrop shank and an ivory or boxwood ring. What is now more typically called the "blowfish," Lars refers to simply as the "cross-grain," but I digress. Essentially, my own blowfish is a melding of Lars' crossgrain and the "fugu" blowfish I learned to make at the feet of Hiroyuki Tokutomi.

In this case, however, my intention is to move outside the parameters of those norms I typically allow to bracket my work, and create pieces which specifically reflect my own ideas about it. The problem is that so-called "original" iterations of this shape are often hideous flaccid-shanked monstrosities with more "fins" than a radiator, or worse yet, wagon wheels on a stick. I'm hoping to avoid both while still managing to breathe new life into the famed fish. In my opinion, I've done that with the piece below, but you know what they say; opinions are like . . . everybody's got one.