Musings on Life in General: Blowfish

Showing posts with label Blowfish. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Playing Catch Up

I've really had my nose to the grindstone these past several months--finishing up commissions, making Christmas presents, caring for sick family members, hosting various pipemakers and aspiring pipemakers, attending to my honey-do list, interviews and photo shoots for P & T, the list goes on. With all that, I've not had much of an opportunity to post to my blog or even my twitter feed. My plan is to spend January updating my website, posting regularly to my blog, and twittering about my ongoing projects in the shop. In the mean time, here's a little update on what I've been doing for the past couple months. Here is a sampling of pieces completed in the latter months of 2009. I hope you enjoy. If you'd like to get regular updates but haven't signed up yet, please feel free to e-mail me. Thanks for a great 2009! Hope you all enjoy the photos.

Todd

This is a little nosewarmer blowfish with boxwood cap and a very thin sliver of mammoth ivory just because. When I was working with Lars one time, I asked him why he had capped a shank face with ivory when it would never be seen. He responded by saying simply, "This is just a way to say 'Lars was here also.'" I've heard it said that one definition of quality is that even the things you can't see are done well.

This is a very special Elephant's foot. Blocks that will give you both the proper grain orientation and a significantly long shank are one in a million. Pipemaking is always a collaborative effort with the raw materials one uses to create.

This is a piece I created while hosting pipemaker Charles Cole. He wanted to see the techniques required to create this effect. This is a beautiful piece of spalted maple, and it must be said that such a stem/shank treatment is necessarily an homage to my good friend, Jody Davis.

Simply put, this is, in my opinion, the best blowfish, and perhaps the best pipe, I've ever made. I shaped this during my interview with P & T magazine about a month ago. The ebonite rod required for the stem was about 3" in diameter!

These are the three smooth Christmas pipes for 2009. The stems are antique bakelite in Jade and Crimson.

This is a magnum Samurai Volcano, the last piece of 2009. I struggled to decide whether to blast this or keep it smooth. The growth rings on this pipe are so prominent that it would have been unreal if blasted. That said, obscuring grain like this would have been criminal.

Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Ceci n'est pas une pipe.

There is a great deal of debate between so called "smokers" and "collectors" about what a pipe's true purpose is. The former designate it as a humble tool, something that is intended to combust tobacco, nothing more. The latter generally prefer that, as well as functioning efficiently as a tool, the pipe also look beautiful and have a certain je ne sais quoi, if you will. For some collectors, the fact that a pipe has the ability to perform a task, to operate as a tool by burning tobacco, is purely secondary or perhaps even inconsequential.

This, I would argue, is the point at which art and craft merge. Were the maker to take any less care in engineering the piece efficiently as a tool, the piece would be significantly diminished and would move from being the highest expression of its form to a mere object, a thing. If, for instance, a pipe did not have a draft hole, it would, in many ways, cease to be a "pipe." This is why, in any given medium, it is important to operate within certain parameters. With the bounds of the expression limited, the artist/craftsman must call upon increasingly greater skill and creativity in order to articulate something extraordinary. Necessity, as they say, is the mother of invention.

One needs only to think of Sixten's skillful use of bamboo during the war. Briar was not being exported from italy, there was a limited amount, and blocks were cut in half to stretch the supply. Since pipes need shanks--though one can point to exceptions for this--Sixten engineered a beautiful, elegant, and ultimately successful expression of "the pipe," using bamboo instead of briar for its shank. By moving outside the general principles of pipe aesthetics yet staying within the confines of what properly constitutes a pipe, Sixten elevated the expression of form within the medium, "pipe."

For those of us that hope our work will be judged to have done likewise, the boundaries of expression are not a static force, but a malleable set of principles whose governance we submit to willingly. In the end, the artist works collaboratively with such boundaries in order to elevate the craft.

For my own part, I care little if a pipe is smoked or simply admired as a functional object. Over the years, I have created multi-thousand-dollar pipes that I knew would never see a flame, and others that, to my delight are smoked on a very regular basis. To my mind, a pipe's "true purpose" is not necessarily fulfilled when it is smoked, but when it is enjoyed.

Zeh Piiiipes!

Many of you have recently asked "Now that you're back making pipes . . . where are the pipes!" The answer to that is that I've been catching up on some orders, working on some new techniques, and not putting a whole lot into the open market right now. For those of you who'd like to see some photos of recent work--including several available pieces--here ya' go. If you'd like to be added to the mailing list, or have questions about the available pieces, please drop me a line and let me know. Soon, I'll add pieces to the newly redesigned Todd-M-Johnson website, where there will be space for many more photos of each piece. Please note that pieces are marked "Available" below and not above their corresponding photos. Stay tuned for more.