Kei-ichi Gotoh: Smooth Fish (0416) Tobacco Pipe

Kei-Ichi Gotoh has a very hard-to-miss way of approaching the Fish; you definitely won't mistake one of Gotoh's for the Tokutomi shape of the same name, and its resemblance to the textbook Blowfish pretty much consists of "uses planes and faces and asymmetry" (which is only slightly more specific than "is a pipe"). Both the Gotoh Fish and the asymmetrical Blowfish (defined by Toku and now practiced by just about everyone) are impressionistic shapes, evoking a sense of the natural form and motions of their subject, but they go about it in very different ways.

Gotoh's might be called the Cubist approach, a Girl with a Mandolin to the Tokutomi Blowfish's Woman with a Parasol. Both are very successful in communicating that sense of their subject with life, posture, and movement (in this case Gotoh even including a splash of water flying off the tail-fin via the base of the stem) without relying upon carving the briar with anatomical details (scales or eyes or such) or even being constrained by an actual fish's body proportions. They're very stylized examples of the pipe-as-art, and stylized in very different, personalized ways, yet the styles still leave an unmistakable impression of their inspiration. You know they are pipes just as you know a painting is canvas and paint, but when you look at them the first thing you think is: Oh, that looks like a fish!

- Eric N. Squires