Maguro (Elephant Grade) Tobacco Pipe

Loosely using the blowfish as a start up form, Alex Florov then flattens and aggressively elongates the bowl to the fore, to create a composition that is sleek, hypnotizing and imbued with a delicious hint of menace. Maguro means tuna in Japanese. While charming, in a smarmy, Madison avenue kind of way, the image that most Americans get in their head when you say "tuna" is a cap-wearing, spectacled cartoon fish which is at odds with the reality associated with these pelagic wonders. A Maguro can regulate its blood temperature, weigh up to 1500 lbs and move that mass at speeds approaching 50 knots. This Florov Maguro looks like it could give a thunderboat a run for its money.

Prior to seeing this pipe, I would have thought it impossible for a composition to bristle with such keen, knife like edges and yet still coax the eye to take the composition in as a whole, prior to moving to the details. Alex's compelling use of balancing and oppositional forms (the concavity held within the leaf form of the right panel meeting the convexity of the similar form on the left is a fine example) and the use of compound angles that would be impossible for any other carver to imitate.simply draw you in. In keeping with an aesthetic that I have seen in other Florov master-works, there is no bevel begun on this composition that does not continue on a circumnavigation back to its birthplace. In a great leap forward, the poignantly beautiful placement of plateau on the fore of the bowl compels my thoughts across the pacific. Still, though a myriad of individually dazzling details may be found within the form of a pipe, all is lost if the details, once bound, create cacophony rather than harmony. This overarching composition is the very embodiment of potential energy caught at a nanosecond prior to becoming kinetic. Magnificent!

--Bear Graves