Sabina Santos: Sandblasted Natural Bent Apple with Mammoth Tobacco Pipe

One of Portugal's artisan pipe makers, Sabina Santos took up the craft of pipe making as a way to express herself creatively, inspired in part by her husband's pipe smoking. For three years she refined her skills through trial and error. Eventually, she traveled to Denmark and studied under some of the world's most talented artisans, including Tom Eltang, Kai Nielsen, Tao, Former, and Kurt Balleby. Santos took the knowledge she accrued from those carvers and married it with her own creative sensibilities and created a truly unique style that is distinctly her own.

This bent Apple is a truly breathtaking example of her craftsmanship, as it possesses a certain organic character without being overwhelming or too visually busy. The nearly spherical bowl stands proudly at the fore of the composition and features a wide heel that softly tapers upward toward the rim. Cheeking along the transition visual demarcates the bowl from the shank and accentuates the bowl's aft wall and heel, allowing the totality of the bowl's curvature to be appreciated and admired. The shank curls high, away from the bowl, and swiftly flares into a slender saddle stem. The rapid expansion of the shank leads the eye to the mammoth accent at the shank's end. The accent's striking blue hues are natural and a result of mineralization that occurs when the material is frozen in soil. The mammoth's blue tones harmonizes with the blue pigment of the saddle stem, creating a unified color palette in the back half of the composition. A crisp, natural sandblast dresses the stummel and unveils rippling growth rings across the flanks of the bowl that radiate to the rim, providing plenty of visual and tactile intrigue.