Concave and Convex Lines

[sandahlpipe]

I was talking to a friend about what makes some pipes “speak” to the customer as opposed to others. I’ve made a few twisted horns, where every surface is concave. But I was then thinking what is common as to why people buy some shapes over others, and especially why the Danish shapes are generally considered so attractive.

What I came up with is there are some concave lines that tend to communicate being unwelcome, such as a wrought iron gate with spikes. And there are others, such as a domed door of a cathedral that’s intended to be welcoming. I think people relate to “inviting” lines. And I think the Danish shapes tend to focus more on convexity. This, of course, presupposes all other things are equal in terms of fit and finish. But it also does explain why a pinch of the shank near the bowl, or a middle section of a pipe that’s over-blasted. Now certainly, there’s an oddball for every shape, but I’m talking about what constitutes the average buyer.

Just my two cents. May or may not be worth stopping to pick up off the ground.


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[Ocelot55]

Oh boy.... This is a can of worms, but I think as an intellectual discussion is worth pursuing.

I certainly sympathize with the thought that, at it's core, there is something objective to beauty. Whether this is evidence of a Divine architecture or some idiosyncratic remnant from our ancestoral lizard brain, I do not know. What is considered beautiful varies from culture to culture and person to person, but I believe certain features are more likely to be attractive than others to a majority of folks. I don't know if I see the relationship between concave and convex lines the same way you do, and typically, most pipes in the Danish school of design are going to have both concave and convex lines complimenting one another. I can envision a pipe with all concave lines, but I cannot envision one with all convex. I'm sure Freudians suggest that we find the shapes of these lines so inviting because of some deep seated sexual desire. You hear the comparison between pipes and the features of the female body compared often on pipe forums. I would suggest that a pipe, especially the bowl, just makes sense with convex lines because, drumroll please ..... it's more comfortable to hold. If something achieves its desired function in an efficient and pleasant manner we develop positive associations with that tool or object which makes those features more attractive. Which leads me to another point.

A feature you neglected to mention is the effect of straight lines. I personally find straight lines on pipes very attractive, for example the shank on a classic English billiard, or the paneled shank on a bulldog. This goes straight to the form and function relationship I stated earlier, as well as our satisfaction in precision. If I see a line on a pipe that should be straight, but isn't, it usually drives me up the wall.

One last anecdote. I see A LOT of pipes each year. Last year I refurbished over 1000 and handled at least that many more new pipes. Several times each year Scott and I have a contest over the "ugliest" pipes. We will each pick a pipe we find hideous, we will clean and upload them, and then place bets over how fast they will sell. We haven't had one of these ugly pipes last longer than a month before it's sold. It just demonstrates that no matter how ugly I find a pipe, there is someone out there that wants to put down good cash for it.

I hope this thread stimulates some conversation, because I'm curious to see how much you guys think about this, if at all.

[sandahlpipe]

Good thoughts, Jesse.

The idea was that some pipes consist of more concavity than convexity in the bulk of their lines. And you’re right to bring up straight lines. The straight billiard is possible to make with (almost) only straight and convex lines. Bent pipes rely on both, but are balanced. Like the neck of a swan. But as with the swan’s neck, the bottom line is concave, but the top line is convex, the bent pipe is the other way around.

I’d love to understand the How of lines with art and relatability, but for now, just after a guy check to see if I’m onto something.

And I believe you about ugly pipes selling quickly. For every pipe, there’s a buyer. I know some people don’t care if they wear socks with sandals, too. But the kind of people who buy high end pipes, it seems, buy some pipes over others.


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[cpd2186]

This discussion is above my pay grade!

[seamonster]

I think the "debate"over convex and concave needs some more nuance. It's possible to make convex and concave shapes clunky and inelegant, and, obviously (Danish masters....) possible to make both incredible natural, dynamic and surprising. I think that is what matters. Now, describing what makes a curve clunky vs. elegant is much pickier to figure out, beyond obvious wobbles and discontinuous flow. Some would argue symmetry, others the opposite. Some talk of flow and organicness.... but what's that?

The same conversation had been going on in the fine art works for hundreds of years.... it's why Brancusi was so good. And maybe it's not about what coaxes collectors to buy, but rather what inspires humans to enjoy. (which leads to buying...)

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[Sasquatch]

This is a fun topic, and deep as hell.

What is "organicness"? Well, look at nature. Nature has no straight lines. No tree has a straight branch, no river runs straight. Striations in rock are not really straight, the occassional zone or layer I suppose is... but in general, things are kind of a mess. So if you make a pipe that is a square box, it's going to be jarringly un-organic. But a billiard is jarringly un-organic too, sleek and symmetical. If you look at a Japanese blowfish, the "organicness" (a combination of the ideas of Fukinsei and Shizen I suppose) are dramatic and obvoious - little bits of plateau left on a side, for example, or at the rim. A herky-jerky lack of symmetry that might represent motion. A Danish version is much more a set of French curves, a mathematical representation of nature rather than a visceral one.

Light reading: https://www.presentationzen.com/present ... a-goo.html

If we go back to pipes themselves as art, or pieces with intrinsic attractive value, we can talk about where those values come from. Assume that the following is true: offered chimp porn or food, a captive male chimpanzee with starve to death with an erection. It doesn't have to be true for the idea I'm going to present to be right, but run with it. The most powerful, driving basic need we have is sexual. All our ideas of beauty might stem from that. Every echo of an echo (boobs look like bums and bums are close to something pretty nice) that drives us. All those curves, all those proportions. Hell, you turn the corner driving to the grocery store, and there's someone walking ten blocks ahead, you IMMEDIATELY zoom in and assess (correctly 99% of the time) whether it's male or female, and whether it might be of an age to fuck. We just do this stuff. We pretend not to but it's BS. We are wired to seek out mates, and wired to seek out attractive mates (not art).

If there's overlap, it probably occurs in very very basic ways - curvatures that remind us of bums or boobs, proportions we find pleasing (ideas like the golden ratio step in here, and it's maybe not that it's so mystically pleasing as that lots of mathematically driven stuff like this is simply presented to us, day after day, through our sensory experience). Bruce just recently died here, so I'll share something he told me once. "The beauty of the human hand is infinite." Now what the fuck could that mean? It's dead simple - what do you see more often than your hands? Nothing. What can curve to form any gesture you like? Your hands. What is your primary tool for exploring the world? Hands. Like, these things are EVERYTHING to us. So learn from them.

So if you carve a billiard and it looks a bit like a fist (or an iron gate post to tie into the earlier posts), it might not be quite as attractive, quite as accessible visually, as a billiard that is carved in a slightly more forgiving shape - think of the shape of your hand if you were offering someone an apple - upright, canted forward, clean and no surprises, nothing hidden. Think of the little nuances a guy can do on a pipe - you make a billiard and the bowl of the pipe is say, 1.5" across and you want to drill a hole for tobacco. How big should that hole be? If it's too small the thing looks silly, if it's too big, worse yet. But anything from say, 5/8" to maybe 15/16" will smoke just fine. Cut whatever you like! Except if you get the proportions wrong, the pipe will look like a tight-lipped librarian! It has to be READY for the tobacco, it has to look like a baby-bird, hungry for that worm, not a closed off, distant thing. (I somewhere have two pictures, a billiard on the lathe cut with a flat rim and the same pipe 30 seconds later with a bevel cut into the rim, and it's infinitely nicer looking with the bevel).

I think a lot of this stuff is pretty universal, and generally if you put out a table full of pipes, you'd get a bell-curve if you asked 1000 people which was the "nicest" (means different things to different people). But there'd be .. some ... consensus. That's a very strange result, if you think about it. Yes, even ugly pipes sell, but all of us who have made 10 pipes and listed them for sale, we know which one or two are likely going to sell first. I'm very seldom wrong about that. And it's because... they are "better". They are "nicer". In any number of funny little ineffable ways perhaps, but usually you know why, usually there is something that is holistically recognizeable as "just right".

[seamonster]

Thank you Sasquatch.

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[RickB]

If we go back to pipes themselves as art, or pieces with intrinsic attractive value, we can talk about where those values come from. Assume that the following is true: offered chimp porn or food, a captive male chimpanzee with starve to death with an erection. It doesn't have to be true for the idea I'm going to present to be right, but run with it. The most powerful, driving basic need we have is sexual. All our ideas of beauty might stem from that. Every echo of an echo (boobs look like bums and bums are close to something pretty nice) that drives us. All those curves, all those proportions. Hell, you turn the corner driving to the grocery store, and there's someone walking ten blocks ahead, you IMMEDIATELY zoom in and assess (correctly 99% of the time) whether it's male or female, and whether it might be of an age to fuck. We just do this stuff. We pretend not to but it's BS. We are wired to seek out mates, and wired to seek out attractive mates (not art).

If there's overlap, it probably occurs in very very basic ways - curvatures that remind us of bums or boobs, proportions we find pleasing (ideas like the golden ratio step in here, and it's maybe not that it's so mystically pleasing as that lots of mathematically driven stuff like this is simply presented to us, day after day, through our sensory experience).

Great post.

I'm generally inclined to think that there's something to this - from a sort of evolutionary psychology perspective, some curves are just wired into our reptile brains to be more pleasing - and that's because in some contexts, those curves represent things like likelihood of fertility (studies on hip-to-waist ratio etc. would come into play here). Once you start thinking about this and really look at things around us (specifically things that were manmade and designed to be beautiful - whether that's a primary goal or an auxiliary one), you'll start to see this shit everywhere because good, beautiful design is satisfying on an almost visceral level.

To me, two pretty obvious examples outside of pipes are guitars (there's a reason that a stratocaster still looks good 65 years later) and cars (I mean who doesn't want to stick their dick in an early '70s Corvette?). I see it in things like faucets and places on my commute where the road curves in a pleasing way. Curves and flow are everywhere, and everyone knows and can appreciate when it looks "right" once it does, but getting it so that it does is the challenge.

[sandahlpipe]

Thanks for the thoughtful reply, Sas!

I’m not 100% sure on whether boobs are an adequate explanation for why convex lines are more pleasing. After all, many women feel threatened emotionally by another woman’s sexuality when they’re married. So whatever is objectively beautiful has to go beyond just the male psyche.

However, some places you would see concave lines are bellies of malnourished people, mud puddles, and potholes. So the sorts of things you might associate with beauty do seem to be more focused on convexity, though not exclusively.

And I do agree there’s consensus on what constitutes beauty if people are honest. True, there is an element of subjectivity involved as well as people deluding themselves into thinking something beautiful because of emotions. But I’d be surprised if 1000 people didn’t have some consensus about what’s a beautiful pipe, and there’s no doubt if it has sexy curves, it would be selected most often. Sometimes I’ll even take a pipe in to show my wife and I can barely keep my eyes off the pipe I’m working on. There’s an element of this whole beauty thing that actually goes beyond the artist’s comprehension. The hands and imagination can create something that the eyes can’t get enough of.


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[Sasquatch]

I've never thought about whether concavity or convexity was "nicer". One of my favorite pipe shapes is the Peterson "Sherlock Holmes", the 05 shape, now the XL11 I think, it's full of convexity.

What I do know is that if I pick up two oranges and one is plump and round and orange, and the other is saggy and half-green, I want one and not the other. The assymetry of the cripple is not celebrated as sexy in any culture I've ever heard of. (Some cultures would take such a child and make them a shaman or so, but not a hunter). Health and vitality is attractive, I think those ideas carry over. I suspect that women and men might have different takes here too - perhaps women have a natural preference for solid, long-lasting, dependable, strong art and men have a preference for softer landings, I have no idea, that would be fun to sort out.

It's really tough to take the cultural/psychological stuff out of these analyses - how conditioned are we about this simply because we have all been exposed to the same teachings? Would Aliens agree about what a nice pipe is? Would someone from the deepest heart of the African jungle pick an S. Bang over a pipe turd? No idea. The universality of some of this stuff might be better couched as "universality within this certain paradigm" (call it european descended overfed bozo paradigm).

There's LOTS to unpack here.

It might not be that boobs are so nice because they are boobs, it might be that they are so nice because their curves match Fibonacci's sequence or something like that - a lot of this stuff seems to be mathematical at it's heart (nature generates a lot of things by recursion and sequencing, fractal geometry is everywhere, it's pretty neat). So maybe we pick up on what would almost be like a Platonic ideal when we see it, even if we don't recognize it. Maybe it's simpler than that and nice looking stuff is just nice looking stuff.

I'd like a comparison between painting and pipe making. I don't know enough about that kind of art to comment much, but my understanding is if you know a lot about painting, you can stand in a room full of art and basically pick the "best" pieces, and that other painters would pick the same ones- it's dead obvious to them which the best are, the way we'd all pick up Ivarssons and Rasmussens off a table full of pipes.

[sandahlpipe]

The Sherlock Holmes shape by Peterson is a good example of what I'd consider concave lines. Concave because the middle of the bowl tends to pinch together like a corset on a bustless torso. Compare that to the curves of a Danish apple, where the convex curves are showing themselves everywhere except in the case of a bent shank where the concave line atop the shank compliments the convex line beneath the shank.

I think there is a cultural element to what one considers beautiful. Some things, such as the physique of a starving person, are universally unattractive whereas when you look at paintings of Venus, she's usually quite plump compared to the Barbie body that many women strive for. So there's a health/vitality aspect, a cultural aspect, and a time aspect. And I think there's a conditioning aspect as well. People who haven't seen a Barbie before would probably think the thin women were unhealthy and unattractive.

And I would tend to think of this in terms of a Platonic ideal as well. And to tie it into math, we even use terms like "round numbers" to refer to abstract concepts. The patterns of the universe resonate throughout every discipline. I think for most people the resonance of a pipe's aesthetic is subconscious in the form of attraction, but we're no closer to the heart of it when we can describe the relationship, because the wonder doesn't dissipate with knowledge.

I'll have to leave the painting part to an expert. I appreciate painting enough to visit art museums when I get the opportunity, but when I go, I just assume if someone else stares at one longer, it must be better.

[DocAitch]

Great set of posts from our resident philosopher/aestheticists (if there is such a word.)
This sort of discussion sits it the back of my head when I am approaching a final shape, and occasionally- “Whammo!- that’s what he meant!”
Thank you gentlemen.
DocAitch