Grechukhin: Difference between revisions

I hope he understood me... But in any case we had to go our separate ways so we could work without treading on each other’s toes.

Well, that’s only natural, I suppose. I mean, I had an academic education and I’d learned a lot about drawing when I was still a kid. I’d imbibed the concept of proportion with my mother’s milk, so to speak. I was accepted as a member of the Union of Artists twenty years ago for a collection of pipes made of mahogany. But the old man... excuse me for saying this, but he was completely self-taught. A self-taught genius, mind you.

Incidentally, that reminds me of a true story, which sounds more like an anecdote. At the first ‘Slow Smoking’ competition that was held in St. Petersburg four years ago, I was the honorary chairman of the jury. When the competition was over, one of the competitors – a very striking man of about sixty – triumphantly announced that he was the possessor of a unique collection that contained six Fydorov and four Grechukhin pipes. Then he proposed that the next competition should be held in memory of those two great pipe masters, Fyodorov and Grechukhin. I timidly raised my voice from the hall and said: “Excuse me, but I’m not dead yet...” You should have seen the man’s face – his eyes almost burst out of their sockets. It turned out that the poor chap, who was about ten years older than me, had bought the pipes a quarter of a century ago and put me among the classics – and, as we all know, the classics are supposed to be dead...

Well, I’m in no hurry to get to the next world, I can assure you... But the point I’m getting at is something else. I started making pipes years ago and worked on them for about nine years without a break. I must have turned out about three thousand at the very least. But then what? It’s not so much that I got tired of doing it, but suddenly I felt like trying my hand at something else, while remaining a free agent. I’ve never in my life received wages or a salary, only payments...