Wow! To digress a little bit, when Jeff first hit the Chicago Show he was kind enough to stop by our hospitality suite (room 1416, a number that will be forever etched in my mind) and open the padded attach� that housed his one of a kind wares. While Sykes and I handled each creation with an utterly unfeigned awe and admiration, there was just one man in the room who was thinking "Ah, screw me. I have already told tens of thousands of pipe smokers that I think that Jeff is the total cheese on the pipe macaroni, and then he goes and gets even better! Now what?" I bet you can guess that that man wasn't Sykes or Jeff. About a day later, still pre-show, I asked Jeff how the sales were going? "Only have a couple left". I grinned and, with a voice veritably dripping with sarcasm, muttered "Quelle surprise...".
During the time that I have been observing Jeff's shaping, I have watched him go from a "good start", with the central line of his compositions, to "as good as it gets with a Yank". Take a look at the underside of this pipe. Anyone else seeing a bit of Lars at the end of the metaphorical tunnel? The exterior of that line is sublimely graceful, the flow is both intuitive and seems as natural and inevitable as watching water course through a channel. What can I say about this grain that you have already not surmised from the pics? In my mind, to become a master there is a line that a carver must move past, a line that the vast majority of full time pipe carvers will never cross. That tidal mark can be said to have been reached when a carver can consistently create pipes of such overarching perfection of shape that a collector is compelled to take in the pipe as a whole, before moving to a given individual aspect. Jeff had about six of those in his case and I suspect the percentages are about to rapidly grow.
--Bear Graves
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