Tom Rupnicki
United States
NightOrbs™ magically transforms outdoor space with the beauty and glow of hand-blown glass. These distinctive illuminators blend function and artistry to create enchanting lighting for landscape or water features, and serve as distinctive garden accents. Each hand-blown glass orb is an original work of durable art that comes with its own two-part sealed cast-aluminum bronze powder-coated base, or upgrade to a cast silicon bronze base.
NightOrb are low-voltage lighting (12 volts) and use a long-life, 20-watt up to 50 watt LED lamp that provides ambient light for illumination of areas up to 100 square feet. They come in 4”, 8”, 13”, & 18” in diameter. NightOrbs are also now available in Interior models with LED and dimming controls.
18" Sun NightOrb Philadelphia Flower show
1. What’s your background?
I am the creative force behind NightOrbs, as artisan, glassblower, and conceptual designer.
After a successful career in business I went to art school in my thirties majoring in photography as an art form (degree B.A. Columbia College of Art). As a minor I took a ceramics course and realized that I was more interested in using my hands. For several years I worked in ceramics self-educating with many contemporary masters such as Peter Volkes. At Pennland School of Craft for a ceramic workshop I wondered into the glass studio and it was love at first sight. I studied glass at Tyler School of Art and the Studio Corning Museum of Glass. As my passion grew, I built a state of the art glass studio. There I created studio art glass pieces; dropped vessels called Anelli di Colore, Broadway Boogie Woogie and many more. NightOrbs™, colorful lighted spheres for outdoor setting, was born in this studio in 2004. This became the focus of my work combining my love of color and nature.
2. What does your work aim to say?
My intention is to evoke, through color and light, the subtle qualities that inspire the human spirit. My vision in creating NightOrbs™ was to marry the healing effects of light, color and nature into a lasting, original piece of landscape art.
I first had the idea of introducing hand-blown glass into the landscape in 1999. I chose a spherical shape, because it is considered the most perfect form. A marriage of color and light, NightOrbs™ are an ethereal presence in a garden, an object of beauty, a cause for meditation, and an extremely durable and practical landscape illuminator.
Colors generate a response in viewers. The right combination and placement of colors can expand the palette and create an emotional experience – the kind of response one would expect, for example, when viewing Monet’s “Water Lilies.” The color blends for NightOrbs™ result from my own reactions to color and light. The recipes have evolved over time. They have the ability to sing in the garden.
3. How does your work comment on current social or political issues?
My work is definitely not political. I think it reflects on social issues in the need to experience color. Colors vibrate at certain frequencies and can stimulate healing in the human body. My work is about joy.
4. Who are your biggest influences?
Glass artists: Stephen Rolfe Powell, Lino Tagliapietra, and Pino Signoretto.
Mark Rothko the color field painter, James Turrell, Robert Irwin, Picasso, and Caravaggio to name a few.
Back yard Oak Park, Illinois
5. How has your art evolved over the years?
My art has evolved as my perspective about art and life and improved and grown. This can be seen in different mediums I use.
6. What does art mean to you?
Art is the manifestation of energy expressed out of joy or darkness. It has the ability to move, stimulate, and energize the human spirit. It is some of human-kinds highest accomplishments.
7. What’s the most valuable piece of art to you?
Of my glass pieces the dropped vessel, “Ring of Fire” is the most valuable as all the elements of color and form come together in a perfect union. The most recent valuable piece of art that I have created recently is a hand built ceramic piece called “Blue Morpheus.
8. What’s next for you in the future?
I will continue working in hot glass, designing NightOrbs™ and creating glass and steel mobiles.
93 Orblets in Kalea Bay fountain
