Smooth Elephant's Foot with Bamboo (241) (Signature) Tobacco Pipe

Yang Kun is a Chinese artisan whose years of work in the film and television makeup industry and intense love for the Danish school of pipe carving have combined to lend him a uniquely organic and wholly expressive carving style. This Elephant's foot is the first pipe of its kind we've seen from Kun, and it finds its roots in the work of late Swedish master artisan Bo Nordh, who conceptualized the shape specifically to showcase the most of a briar block's birdseye grain. This take on the modern classic shape is a good bit different compared to those Nordh crafted himself in a number of ways, though the most prominent departure is this pipe's proud, standing posture and the stylized, foot-like platform it stands atop. The structure of this foot is unique, as a rounded platform extends from the fore wall and flares out to a flat face, working alongside the aft side's tail-like structure and concave, crescent-shaped carving at the end to allow this pipe to be rested on any convenient flat surface. The arrangement of this lower bowl is immediately reminiscent of the highly sculptural Speared Fish shape, and it lends the trajectory of the upper bowl an extremely dynamic arc, as the walls flare out and curve rearward. In more standard Elephant's Foot renditions, the bowl is framed by a wrapping panel that surrounds its midsection through the flanks and over the rim, though here, the bowl's fore section is lined with firm ridges at the sides: defining a swift taper toward the fore, where the softer contours of the lower bowl become a swath of craggy plateau from the transitional area to the rim. Geometrical facets just below the rim create further firmness at the fore wall, and sharply outline the wall's swift outward taper to the broad panel of plateau. A rather wide transition gives way to a short, swiftly tapering shank that's met by a quartet of bamboo knuckles that join the shank to a sleek saddle stem of black vulcanite. Dressed in a rich, ruby-tinged stain, the stummel here showcases handsome grain throughout, with cross grain throughout the bowl's flanks and plenty of birdseye through the lower fore wall of the bowl: this pipe's excellent shaping and grain combining to earn it Kun's superlative Signature grade.