Andrey Kharitonov Smooth Blowfish Handmade Briar Pipe, New [SOLD]

Description

Muscovite artisan Andrey Kharitonov has, from his 20th birthday onward, never been without a pipe. Born in the former Soviet Union, Kharitonov’s first pipe was a gift, carved from cherry wood by his brother; years later, after happening upon a store in his home city that sold Italian Manno briar, he decided that he would try carving his own pipes. Over the next years he would experiment with shapes and styles, gradually building up a cult following on Russian- and English- speaking pipe forums. Though he credits Victor Yashtylov, Misha Revyagin, and Alexey Kharmalov as sources of inspiration, Kharitonov’s pipes are – in the best of ways – immediately recognizable as his own.

I have been following Kharitonov’s work for several years now, owing to his renown on certain pipe forums. Most of his pipes have this strange ability to be both familiar and unfamiliar, if you get what I mean. Take this blowfish: it has the usual hallmarks of the modern shape, with wide port and starboard planes sandwiching a distinctly narrow bowl. But Kharitonov has also eschewed the typically organic quality of the blowfish by adding panels and lips where simple curves would otherwise be, taking the shape in a direction that could be compared to cubist architecture, or other modernist art and design movements. Given that the blowfish shape has been around for decades (I asked a friend for an estimate, and he claimed that Sixten Ivarsson was already making something like it in the 1960s), and that as a result it has been reinterpreted countless times, it’s difficult to do anything new with it these days. Kharitonov’s blowfishes, on the other hand, might just have done that.

This Kharitonov is completely unsmoked, having come to us via our estates trade-in program.

 

Details:

Length: 5.5″ / 139.7mm

Bowl Width: 0.79 / 20.06mm

Bowl Depth: 1.45″ / 36.83mm

Weight: 2.2oz / 64g