Mallorca
— — the light that kept Chopin through the winter.
Not only on a wall.
“An island in the western Mediterranean, the largest of Spain's Balearics. Palma holds the south coast with its sandstone cathedral; the Serra de Tramuntana rises along the northwest, terraced with olives the Moors planted a thousand years ago. The interior is quieter than the postcard suggests, with stone villages and almond groves that flower white in February. — from the studio
Mallorca, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Mallorca is the largest of the Balearic Islands, an autonomous community of Spain in the western Mediterranean, roughly 200 km east of Valencia. The island covers about 3,640 square kilometres with a population near 900,000, most of it gathered around Palma on the southern bay. The Serra de Tramuntana mountains run 90 km along the northwest coast and were inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2011 for the dry-stone terraces farmers cut into the limestone slopes over a thousand years.
Palma Cathedral, La Seu, was begun in 1229 under James I of Aragon and finished four centuries later. Antoni Gaudí led a controversial restoration between 1904 and 1914, hanging the iron baldachin over the high altar and reorienting the choir. Inland, the stone villages of Deià, Valldemossa, and Sóller are built of the warm ochre sandstone the island calls marès, the same stone the cathedral's walls were cut from, and the same stone the Romans first quarried at Santanyí.
The light is what brought Frédéric Chopin and George Sand to the Valldemossa monastery in the winter of 1838, what drew Joan Miró to settle in Palma in 1956, and what still draws northern European painters every spring. The island sits at the latitude of Naples but catches a softer Mediterranean haze, especially from the Tramuntana ridge looking south in the late afternoon, when the limestone goes the colour of honey and the sea below turns the deeper blue Sand described.