Anglia Perdita 1921 - 1925

F. L. Griggs made this intaglio print, "Anglia Perdita," sometime in the early 20th century, pulling lines into the plate, a lost England emerging through labor. I love the tonal range he achieves with simple lines. Just imagine the painstaking process of carving into that plate. Was he lost in the details, or did he have the whole cathedral mapped in his mind’s eye? What does it mean to redraw a place that is already lost? Maybe, as an artist, Griggs was also thinking about the way that cities and places continue to evolve, to be lost and found again in memory. Think about how he builds the cathedral with repetitive strokes, one mark at a time. It's a kind of devotion, or meditation. There’s a bridge on the lower left, a little gangplank, that is so humble and real. That simple structural element offers the viewer a way into the print’s architectural fantasy.