Alexander Tupitsyn: Smooth Blowfish Tobacco Pipe

Alexander Tupitsyn is one of three artisans who comprise the PS Studio workshop in Russia, working alongside Sergey Dyomin and master maker Vladimir Grechukhin, as well as carving handmade pipes under his own name. Tupitsyn's style is influenced by his time as Grechukhin's student, with compact, stout proportions true to the St. Petersburg school of design. This Blowfish is decidedly the opposite of compact, coming in at slightly more than six inches long, though it maintains an appropriately robust silhouette that keeps it feeling substantial in hand. The Blowfish is a rare shape to see from Tupitsyn, one that we've only seen as new from him a handful of times, and this particular take on the modern classic shape stands out among his previous iterations thanks to its subtle fusion of styles. His other Blowfish have either maintained the structured asymmetry that the shape became known for, or have eschewed it in favor of a significantly more subtle style of asymmetrical shaping, though this piece acts as a fusion of both those styles: merging soft curves and organic contours with crisp rigidity. The transition here is wide, with enough room to drape a digit if desired, and it gives way to an impressively broad shank that curls up and flares toward its face, where it's met by a sleek saddle stem of demurely downturned black vulcanite for a more comfortable smoking posture. Rather than broadening the shank and stem through width, Tupitsyn has instead enhanced their height, creating a sturdy ovoid that enhances the visual prominence of the aft side in profile while maintaining a striking thinness from the smoker's perspective. At the underside of the stem base, a firm ridge begins its travel through the bottom of the shank from its left side, where it extends toward the transition before jutting out sharply to form a spur-like point. Here, two more ridges manifest, with one curling down toward the bowl and resuming the trajectory of the shank's ridge, lining the lower bowl and rising across the fore wall. The ridge continues, curving around the outer edge of the rim and descending through the left aft side of the wall, pushing out slightly and forming a fin-like structure before coming to rest at the spurred confluence of ridges near the underside. The bowl itself is slightly Apple-like, with a good deal of roundness in profile that's tempered well by the firm-lined arrangement of its left side, while the right side of its build showcases supple contours interrupted by a more subtle ridge: one that reaches across the rim from the left side and curls down through the bowl's aft before dissipating near the lower fore. Dressing this piece is a warm, rich, walnut-tinged stain that unveils dense cross grain wrapping around its midsection and seas of birdseye across both its flanks, with a particularly eye-catching display presented on the left.