Exhibits and essays in appreciation of Teddy and his pipes

Teddy:  An Appreciation

(Notes for a longer essay:  March 2008 draft)

by Thomas Looker

Teddy Knudsen is one of the great pipe-making virtuosos. His fluid style and fertile imagination combine with a breath-taking yet effortless technique to produce carvings of astonishing natural grace and lyricism. Teddy's work brings to my mind the music of Mozart - another master who could transform the simplest materials into occasions of transcendent beauty.

Teddy's skill and imagination as a "reader of briar" are unsurpassed in Europe and perhaps only rivaled in Japan by Tokutomi.  Not only can Teddy intuitively see some of the most beautiful shapes within a particular wood block, his creativity and his passion propel him continually to imagine new, more interesting, and more expressive compositions.  And because his immense talent is wedded to an amiable and whimsical personality, many of  his most stunning pipes are also filled with wit, good humor and fun.

TRADITIONAL TEDDY

Teddy's distinctive voice has been recognizable in his briars for many years.   Traditional Danish shapes like the Volcano and Bent Brandy become particularly supple in Teddy's hands, as  he adds undulating rims, pliable bowls,  or quietly twisting or swelling shanks.  Teddy takes the sometimes stiff lines of the Elephant's Foot and "revoices" them ... adding deft modulations in panel and bowl that can re-harmonize traditional relationships and create unique rhapsodies of graceful movement.

Teddy has also developed many original designs, such as his famous Conch with its sensuous waves and curls.  These lines have been borrowed and improvised upon by carvers around the world, though only a few ever match the easy grace and ineffable charm of Teddy's original versions.

Teddy's trade-mark plateau horns combine fascinating mixtures of texture and form with elongated lines of great elegance and poise.

I’ve often said that the most characteristic aspect of Teddy’s briar carving is that he makes the wood seem to breathe. Sometimes the subtlest variation of line or form can bring a flat or uninteresting shape to life and Teddy’s unerring hand and eye make him the consummate wizard of such magic.

TEDDY TODAY

As impressive as his output has been throughout his forty years as a pipe-maker, Teddy's latest work has often become revelatory.  Teddy appears to have been transported to a new level of insight and understanding about his materials, his craft,  and his art.  At a time of life when many fine artists and artisans can loose their edge and start repeating themselves, Teddy's creative engine has gone into warp-drive - quite literally, as one of the first groupings of his new creations was partly inspired by his love of Star Trek.

Over the past three or four years, Teddy has carved a set of dazzling compositions that break new ground for him personally, and, more generally, for the community of pipe-makers who identify themselves with Danish artisanal traditions.  It seems to me that pipes like Alien, Seal, Starweeper, Lamplighter, Ramses Riding an Elephant, and the two humpbacks, Spyhopper and Lobtail, enlarge and enrich the landscape of creative possibility for European carvers.

Ramses Riding an Elephant

For me, Teddy's newest work is particularly important because it brings together the finest traditions of post-Second-World-War Danish pipe-making with a new level of artistry and self-expression. To the obsession with perfect engineering, immaculate finishing, flexible yet functional shaping, and clean, vivid grain, Teddy has added a new engagement with what I would call the sculptural potential of the briar pipe. Teddy's creations have always been beautiful to look at, as well as wonderful to smoke;  but now they offer us a new range of aesthetic pleasures:  they broaden our sensibilities about how shape, line, grain, color, and texture can be combined to delight our eyes and our fingers, as well as to pleasure our smoking palette.

I think many of Teddy's new pipes can be fully enjoyed as  "sculptures for the hand and mouth."  Smokeable works of art.  Teddy remains more comfortable regarding himself as a highly-skilled craftsman - a maker of pipes rather than an artist in briar.  But Teddy does acknowledge within himself a compulsion that he only partly understands to create carvings that are particularly attractive and interesting  - and it seems to me that this aesthetic impulse contains within it the source of Teddy's artistry.

Lobtail

However we wish to define our terms, Teddy Knudsen's pipes are unquestionably beautiful objects filled with the distinctive personality of their creator.  They provide us with occasions to enrich not only our understanding of pipes, but also our responses to other works of craft and art in the world around us.

In my own case, I have found that studying pipes by Teddy (and Tokutomi) has provided me with "windows into new worlds of delight."  My pleasure and wonder at what I’ve experienced makes me want to rephrase Miranda's famous line in Shakespeare’s The Tempest: "Oh, brave new world, that has such briars in it!"

Starweeper

POST SCRIPT:  TEDDY (AND TOKU) FOR TOMORROW

The new developments in Teddy's work grow primarily out of his own native genius as a craftsman and carver.  But Teddy also acknowledges in some recent pieces the influence of the brilliant Japanese carver Tokutomi.  For his part, Toku greatly admires Teddy's pipes and has occasionally incorporated into his work "improvised variations" on themes by Teddy.

Elsewhere I have suggested that the imaginative affinities I sense between these two briar masters have led them into  "improvisational dialogues" with each other.  Teddy and Toku have grown out of very different cultural and aesthetic backgrounds and the pipes they make reflect these differences.  Yet they share what I might call a transformational vision about briar.  Their hands feel an exceptional degree of plasticity in the wood - in its substance, in its grain - that allows them to imagine new dimensions to its expressive potential.  Both also seem to derive enormous inspiration from the discipline on form and function imposed by their passion to create smoking pipes that are as well-engineered on the inside as they are beautiful on the outside.

Toku's extraordinary use of asymmetry (which can makes briar look like clay) and Teddy's amazingly graceful sense of line and form (which makes the wood seem to breathe) have had a significant influence upon the imaginations of younger pipe-makers, according to what I've seen at pipe shows and on the Internet.  It would seem that some of the future directions for briar carving around the world are currently being suggested and conjured up by the virtuosic carvings (and the subtle, imaginative interactions) of these two pipe-making free-spirits, Hiroyuki Tokutomi and Teddy Knudsen.

For more on the relationship between Teddy and Toku, see the relevant sections in my article originally published in Pipes and Tobaccos magazine and reprinted in an expanded version in the Pipe Notes section of  The Briar Gallery)