Doctor's: Smooth Bent Apple with Bamboo (Double Flash) Tobacco Pipe

There's an organic effortlessness to many of Roman Kovalev's pieces, a combination of vision and technique that spans across his entire body of work. Often, his work seems to sprout from or be truly framed around his use of accent, as he employs more exquisite and rare materials like mokume-gane and polymerized dinosaur bone, but he also has a remarkable penchant for elevating the beauty of something as simple as a single, gnarled piece of bamboo.

This bent Apple is certainly in keeping with Roman's tendency toward organic effortlessness, as the slight elongation at the transition seems to highlight the briar's precise match to the single knuckle of honey blonde bamboo. Said knuckle isn't as gnarled as the most unique uses of the stuff we've seen from the carver, but it's implemented beautifully nonetheless. He's opted to treat it to a light sandblast and a little darkening, pairing it to a creamy wafer of polymerized dinosaur bone and inlay of the same at right side of the shank extension. Roman's use of the natural curvature of the next subsequent line in the bamboo is quite a cool touch too, as the organic multi-bulbed base of the stem echoes the sense of implied sprouting. Really cool, yet still fairly understated work from Roman Kovalev, this "Double Flash" grade (his second highest) is well deserving of its designation.