Martin Romijn Magnum Contrast Stack Egg Handmade Briar Pipe, New

Description

Within the modern artisan community, there are many pipe makers with backgrounds in other forms of art, manufacture, and handicraft, and who apply skills learned in their previous vocations to the creation of their pipes. Some artisans are former machinists; others were carpenters; some were even painters in their past lives. Martin Romijn, on the other hand, belongs to a small minority of pipe makers whose previous career was in stonemasonry. Like Germany’s Frank Axmacher, Romijn spent much of his adult life cutting and sculpting stone, doing so across a broad range of practical and ornamental applications. While those days are now behind him, Romijn still carries with him much of what he learned from working with granite, quartz, and marble. The skills and philosophy he cultivated as a stonemason continue to inform his pipe making endeavors, just as they did when he set his sights on briar nearly a decade ago. And, when asked about his technique regarding the latter, he cracks a wry smile, stating simply that “pipe is already inside the piece of briar, I only have to reveal it by taking away everything that doesn’t look like a pipe!”

To call Martin Romijn’s pipes distinctive would be an understatement. Looking at his portfolio from over the years, it is clear that there is a “Romijn style” of pipe making. After having the pleasure of meeting him at the Chicago Pipe Show this year, it was a pleasure to bring back some of this style’s strongest exemplars for the Romijn Pipes MBSD debut. There is certainly something sculptural about Romiijn’s work; not just in the sense that, with their broad, assertive bowls, they give the impression of a figure perched atop a pedestal, but also in the sense that they possess a sturdiness meant to endure the test of time. In other words, they are both artistic and practical objects, intended to be held as much as they are to be beheld.
In the case of this one, in part inspired by Gert Holbek and his Elsinore series pipes, there is something monumental about the design. Of course, it would not be difficult to describe any pipe as large as this one in such a way, but the more interesting comparison is of its design to monuments as conventionally understood. Its towering bowl, lit up with contrast stained flame grain, stands imposing like a pillar in a public square. Yet it does not do so in a way that divorces it from the rest of the design. Along with the pipe’s unorthodox, yet perfectly complementary, color palette, of especial note is the way the bowl’s convex curvature is mirrored, in inverted form, by the inward fall and rise of the shank as it progresses toward its end.

 

Details:

Length: 6.5″ / 165.1mm

Bowl Width: 0.83“ / 21.08mm

Bowl Depth: 2.28″ / 57.91mm

Weight: 2.6oz / 74g