Sandblasted Canoe Tobacco Pipe

Along with her unique renditions of the Hawkbill shape, Silver Gray's Canoe design is one of the American carver's signatures. To me, it always calls to mind The Last of the Mohicans in which Daniel Day Lewis prepared for his role by carving his own, real canoe with only tools from the film's 18th century setting. While Silver isn't fashioning a buoyant water vessel using only period-specific tools, like Lewis, she has spent countless hours honing and perfecting the design, manipulating the briar with a precise hand into a form that aptly resembles its namesake.

The shape itself is defined by a lithely bent Billiard base form. Curling sinuously through the saddle stem and shank and tapering neatly from shank end to transition, it's marked by a crisp ridgeline that cuts the piece in two, running along the underside and up the bowl's fore as well as down the aft and across the top of the shank. This particular rendition separates itself from others, though, in that Gray has extended the heel a touch more forward, jutting out for a healthy dose of implied momentum through the piece, and has crowned the rim with the briar's natural plateau, oriented slightly at a cant to create a touch of asymmetry. It's all dressed in one of her rustic sandblasts to highlight intersecting ripples of ring grain and vertical striations, brought out handsomely by a contrast stain of chocolate and caramel hues. Beautifully done, it's a well balanced mix of crisp shaping, striking form, and alluring finish.