Partially Rusticated Freehand Tobacco Pipe

If you are even half as stunned as I am at this moment, it's a good thing that both of us are sitting down. We have all watched Kent Rasmussen's progress as a pipe maker for close to a decade now. My first real contact with his work was at the Chicago Pipe Show in the early 2000s, and to say that my first contact with his work left me stunned would be an understatement. Here was this (for all intents and purposes) neophyte carver, two years fresh from getting pointers from the legendary Teddy Knudsen and his work already showed a strength, boldness and clarity of vision that was encroaching on some very famous Dane's territory. The next year he was more advanced and the following year he was better still.

Even if this pipe isn't a harbinger of the Rasmussen briars yet to come, even if we never see its likes again, this composition will represent in my mind a leap forward of such deft enormity, that the Kent gestalt that resides in my noggin will have been forever, and pleasantly, altered. Altered, not because his work hasn't already presented itself as brilliant and visionary, but because this shape enters some realms that I have personally only seen one Dane, one Japanese and one American cross into. Bypassing the fascinating conundrum that this composition contains a surfing element in a reversed position(!), Kent took the advanced concept of creating an exterior vanguard for the interior central line and moved it visually from the body to a gravity bound orbit. This sense is reinforced by the planetoidal sphere of the rusticated body being guarded. In order to create this most extraordinary of forms, Kent had to employ extensive (and extremely time consuming) file work, no sander in any conventional pipe workshop would have worked in such numbingly tight quarters. This stand-alone masterpiece is going to require that I smoke at least one bowl and drink a couple of cups of coffee, before I can move to the next pipe. And yeah, just being close to it was well worth it.

--Bear Graves