Smooth Acorn with Horn Tobacco Pipe

I intentionally didn't discuss these pipes with Adam much before I sat down to write so that I could form my own opinions; the artist and the critic have fundamentally different roles in the creative process.but I digress. Having said that, I'm unsure of this, but I'm fairly confident that this pipe is a pretty overt homage to the sorts of pipes that Sixten Ivarsson, Lars Ivarsson, and Jorn Micke were making in the 1970s. We had a Jorn Micke estate come through here a month or two ago that, while different from this, shared some aesthetic ideas with this pipe. I think the timing was probably not entirely coincidental.

I love the arrow-like straightness of the shank cloaked in softening curvature as the shank pinches gently in the middle to expand at both ends. The stem is a clear reference to the Ivarsson pipes of that era: you could almost set it against a Sixten from the late 1960s or early 1970s and not tell the difference. The bowl, while still being gently referential to Adam's aesthetic forebears of forty years ago, has that sparse, cleanness of line that Adam brings to all of his compositions. It's a remarkable homage piece, but still distinctly Adam's work. That's a difficult line to hew to, yet Adam does so with aplomb.

-- Sykes Wilford