Light, handed down.

The Pioneers · North Africa

Rudyard Morley.

Before there was a trade, there was a pilot. In the Second World War, Rudyard Morley flew bomber missions over Germany and across North Africa — until, on one of them, his aircraft was hit and forced down in the desert.

To bring the rescue planes in, he built a landing strip from what he had: the aircraft's own low-voltage lamps and batteries, laid out across the sand. And waiting there in the dark, he saw something no one had gone looking for — the dunes themselves, remade by that soft low-voltage glow into something quietly beautiful.

He never forgot it. Back home, he found his counterpart in Bill Locklin. Bill built the lamps in Redlands; Rudyard took them out into the world as Nightscaping's salesman. Between the maker and the seller, the landscape-lighting industry was born — and Rudyard became the mentor who handed the craft, hand to hand, to Abel Hurtix.

1984 · The Painter

Abel Hurtix.

Abel Hurtix arrived in Los Angeles in 1984 as an artist. He made his living with pencil, charcoal, and watercolor — drawing the cover art for classic films as they were reissued on VHS, and showing work in the small galleries along Melrose.

The painting fed his eye, but it didn't pay the rent. So he went looking for work to keep the brushes moving.

A New Medium

Lighting, as a brush.

The work he found was at Distinctive Lighting — Rudyard Morley's Los Angeles sales office for Nightscaping. And there, the painter discovered lighting.

Everything he knew about composition came with him. The lamps became his brushes; the dark of night, his canvas; angle and intensity, his pigment. Silhouette, shadow, grazing — he composed a garden the way he had composed a drawing, painting feeling straight into the landscape.

He worked alongside Rudyard for years, learning the trade from one of the men who helped invent it.

1989 · On His Own

LightScaper.

When Rudyard moved on, Abel set out on his own and founded LightScaper in 1989. By then he was a licensed electrician who had studied electrical engineering and the craft of lighting.

But he had entered the trade already carrying the thing that still sets his work apart — composition and drama, brought to a landscape to make an entirely new place after dark.

Made By Hand

Hurtix Craftsman Lighting.

The craft runs deeper than installation. Under the Hurtix Craftsman Lighting name, Abel designs and builds original fixtures by hand — copper and brass lanterns, rattan globes — honest materials, simple forms, clean lines.

It's the same belief in another form: a fixture worth looking at, making light worth living in.