"I'm not even from Fine Arts!” Ramon Orlina enthuses, as if he never got over the unforeseen changes in his life’s itineraries. He spent several years being an architect, taking on huge projects in a prominent firm. And yet all the arts and sciences surrounding architecture seem to apply perfectly in his more than three-decade international career in the fluid, elusive, and enchanting craft of glass sculpting. His dexterous hands tame glass into creations of winding grace, seducing light into its trails, whether in a piece’s core, or flashing off its diamond-cut edges and surfaces. It’s as if Orlina sculpts pure light.

Ramon Orlina with one of his most popular glass sculptures of the Virgin

At first he didn’t want anyone to know that he was working on glass, so he struck out alone, forging his own aesthetics, developing skills and insights. “When I first went into art, no gallery would accept me,” he says. No local critic ever spent time looking at his work, too. Looking back, very few masters knew what was happening to glass as a medium on a global scale. People didn’t have an idea as to what work they should compare Orlina’s with, because the only glass sculpture they were exposed to was his. But eventually his work was recognised in Singapore, when they commissioned two of his monumental works for shopping centres along Orchard Road.

Quatro Mondial, Ben Cab painting on Orlina's white Volkswagen, and the Pilita II a bronze sculpture inspired by Asia's Queen of Songs

In the 1980s he met Stanislavsky Libensky, the grand master of glass art in Prague, who approached him after one of his scholarly presentations to give him a hug, calling him “Il Maestro.” To this day he hears the voices of all the masters who encouraged him to carry on, no matter life’s challenges.

Now that he reminisces on his days of struggle he’d always be struck by how they were indeed the most beautiful. He knows how equally artistic but less-exposed artists feel, which prompted him to gather local talent. It’s only after 10 long years that he sipped wine from his Champagne Fountain (2003), an 8.6 feet-high steel drinking fountain with 112 glass leaves and a lights display (commissioned by Jules Ledesma) that he finally arrived at entertaining guests at his museum’s soft opening last 30 November 2013. Not only does his galleries feature works of acclaimed artists but also those of lesser-known Visayans, which he feels is one of the ways that he could give back.

Some of Orlina's work depict the curves and edges of the female physique

(From left) 'Champagne Fountain,' (2003) commissioned for Jules Ledesma
and Assunta de Rossi; a piece of glass jewellery also crafted by Orlina

Read more in the Philippine Tatler June 2014 issue. Get a copy from any leading newsstands and bookstores or download it to your device from Magzter and Zinio.