Wojtek Pastuch: Smooth Acorn with Mammoth (1326) Tobacco Pipe

Polish artisan Wojtek Pastuch takes inspiration from pipe-making schools the world over, though his key stylistic influences seem rooted in the Japanese and Danish traditions. This Acorn certainly showcases aspects of those styles, though its remarkable heft and presence in hand lend it a distinctly neoclassical character, especially as the bowl takes on the majority of the visual weight in this composition. Though the scale of all this pipe's components is slightly enhanced, the bowl stands out, rising to more than two inches tall and boasting even more breadth than height, creating a robust, imposing figure whose thick walls conceal a capacious chamber. A sweeping heel supports the bowl and highlights its impressive curvature, maintaining the same angle through the entire fore wall and lending the stummel a continuous undercurve broken only by the stem. Given the angle of the fore wall, the entire bowl flows almost naturally into a dynamic forward cant, highlighting its supple contours and their bold flare into a high-set waist and a deeply chamfered, inward-sloping rim rounded by plateau at every edge of the chamber but the aft. The transition is wide and set low on the bowl, giving way to a sinuous shank that curls up to a domed accent of pale mammoth, marking the junction to a sleek and demurely curved stem of jet-black vulcanite. Dressed in a rich, warm, auburn-hued contrast stain, this pipe showcases some beautiful grain, with an uninterrupted band of flame grain surrounding the middle portion of the bowl. Additionally, two similarly unbroken bands of flame flow through the flanks of the shank, and both the top and underside of the stummel display dense swaths of birdseye: the palette nicely contrasted by this pipe's mammoth accent.