Sauro Pipe: Difference between revisions

Then there are the approaches and principles that Sauro has cultivated through reflections on his own craft. A Sauro pipe begins on the page; in his notebooks, he will produce sketches of pipe shapes, other formal elements, or a pipe in its entirety. The sketchbook is vital to Sauro’s process not only as a medium for transcribing new ideas; it is also a catalyst for the imagination, in that it is, as he describes, a “graphic history of [one’s] thought.” This initial stage of the design process will continue for some time until Sauro is content with what has been produced. In a characterization reminiscent of automatism in fine art, he simply states that, “When something harmonious, light and beautiful comes out of the pencil, I stop.”

After this stage, Sauro moves onto selecting briar blocks that will best suit his chosen design, owing to the unique grain patterns each suggests. When the time comes to enter the workshop, Sauro finds it extremely useful to work on several pipes simultaneously, a tip that he picked up from his teacher Mimmo Romeo. The rationale behind this decision is that working on a single pipe at a time breeds compulsiveness and prevents the pipe maker from detaching themselves from the project:<blockquote>''“you learn how to make effective use of the obsessive energy that is typical of a craftsman: in compulsiveness you can no longer distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘a little less than good.’ Therefore, moving from one pipe to another becomes a way to manage this energy, to adopt a certain distance and identify more clearly the possible evolution from the original design, which is rarely as definitive as was thought at the beginning.”''</blockquote>When it comes to design philosophy, Sauro could be called a minimalist of sorts. He strives to produce beautiful and practical pipes that are also comprised of the least number of lines possible; he adheres to a rule that a pipe should juxtapose no more than three colors; and he rarely opts for anything but a natural stain for the stummel, opting instead for oils that enhance its native contrast effects. Coupled with this minimalism, however, is a quality of Sauro’s approach that could be called, ‘nomadic.’ While Sauro maintains a set of basic principles in designing of his pipes, the designs themselves are difficult to generalize. This is partly because, by Sauro’s account, once he has pursued and executed a design that satisfies him, it is rare that he will return to it in the pipes he makes afterwards. Sauro’s nomadism is also evident in that, when faced with a gallery of his works, one could not definitively say that these pipes lean towards, for example, an Italian, a Danish, or a German aesthetic. There are, rather, shaping conventions and motifs traditionally found in distinct locales, or within distinct workshops or schools, dispersed across Sauro’s back catalog.