Sandblasted Paneled Lovat (0910) Tobacco Pipe

While Wojtek Pastuch's more evocative Freehands are certainly striking, I personally love his takes on the classics. The Polish carver simply has a way of examining artifacts from pipe making history, bringing them into new contexts for the modern age. In this particular piece, Pastuch has focused his attention on the classic Foursquare design, a firm and architectural shape defined by its four-paneled faces through the bowl and shank. To bring it into new context, he's played heavily with the proportions, elongating the shank and pairing it with an abbreviated saddle bit, the base of which is likewise squared off to match the structure of the form.

That elongation lends even more visual weight to the shape's firm architecture, while also blurring the lines between Foursquare and Lovat designations. Moreover, he's taken that now firmer, more structured design and softened it through the craggy texture of a deep, gnarly blast, obfuscating the shape's hard lines and rounding off the edges ever so slightly. With the final touches of a smooth, softly domed rim, the result is a first for me personally in the pipe world: An organic take on the Foursquare.