Design Stack: A Blog about Art, Design and Architecture: Drawings in the Night in the Dark

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An artist, who's life spanned between the 1800s and the 1900s.
Artist Martin Lewis was born in Australia in 1881 and died in 1961. He is said to have had a passion for drawing since a young age.

He combined travelling and working various jobs, before returning back to Sidney. Here Lewis got his firs break; when two of his drawings were published in a Sydney newspaper. He then studied at the Art Society's School in Sydney. He is known as one of the first artists that worked as a printmaker.

His chosen medium was Drypoint. The following definition comes from wikipedia: "Drypoint is a printmaking technique of the intaglio family, in which an image is incised into a plate (or "matrix") with a hard-pointed "needle" of sharp metal or diamond point. In principle, the method is practically identical to engraving. The difference is in the use of tools, and that the raised ridge along the furrow is not scraped or filed away as in engraving.[1] Traditionally the plate was copper, but now acetate, zinc, or plexiglas are also commonly used. Like etching, drypoint is easier to master than engraving for an artist trained in drawing because the technique of using the needle is closer to using a pencil than the engraver's burin."

Night drawings or drawings with a predominance of black background are some of my favourite. There's just something special, magical about them. In a daylight drawing you usually see the relevant and the irrelevant. The artists seem to feel the need to add as much as the can, to fill the scene. Night-time drawings seem to edit out the superfluous, to shine a spotlight on what the artist really wants to show you.