Friedman (Richard Friedman)

Friedman is the name given to the limited workshop output that American pipe maker Richard Friedman stamped with his own name. Known for freehand interpretations following the Danish line and for sculptural pieces depicting sea creatures, Friedman never turned the craft into a full-time profession, confining his output to certain months of the year.

Bench and Working Rhythm

According to records, the workshop was set up in Bellingham, in northern Washington State, at the harbor where Friedman's boat wintered. His main occupation was seafaring: together with his wife Nancy, he ran a charter boat offering weekly cruises for small groups in Alaskan waters. When the cruising season closed, roughly half the year was left for the bench, and this seasonal rhythm shaped both the volume and the character of his output.

Not needing to make a living from pipemaking removed the pressure of an order calendar. Friedman is known to have tried his hand at classic shapes as well, but the bulk of his work leaned toward freehand carving — that is, toward Danish-style forms developing according to the grain in the block rather than to measure and symmetry.

The Danish Connection

His relationship with pipes goes back to 1967, when his uncle bought him a sandblasted W.Ø. Larsen pickaxe from the Barclay Rex shop in New York. Remaining both a smoker and a collector in the years that followed, Friedman built his collection largely around Danish-made examples, especially Larsen-stamped pipes.

His move into the craft is traced to meeting Danish maker Tonni Nielsen at a pipe show in Richmond. Nielsen confirmed that a significant portion of the top-grade Larsen pipes in the collection had come from his own hand; the closeness that formed between the two turned into training when Friedman spent two weeks working at Nielsen's workshop. Brief as it was, this stint is credited with grounding Friedman's approach to reading grain and building form in the Danish tradition.

Sea Creatures and Technical Experiments

The most visible reflection of a life spent at sea is a series depicting creatures such as whales, dolphins, sea urchins, snails and nautiluses. These pieces stand apart in moving away from familiar pipe silhouettes toward something closer to carved sculpture, and they are the body of work chiefly responsible for keeping the Friedman name in circulation within the field.

On the technical side, his focus was the double-chamber arrangement. He experimented with applying the calabash pipe's logic of letting smoke settle in a wide second chamber by placing that chamber inside the shank instead; the result was pipes that look ordinary from the outside but function on the inside like a reverse calabash.

Current Status

The website associated with the Friedman name has gone offline, and his pipes are now seen only in secondary circulation; production is therefore considered to have ended, though no exact closing date is known. Nor is there a reliable record of the starting year; the workshop's active period can only be placed roughly between the late 2000s and the 2010s.