Shine A Light

"The light. The light is magnificent." A friend who knows more about photography than I do once said this, on returning from a morning's camera work around the bay of Pollensa. Light is a medium for the photographer and for the artist. Many a visitor might remark that it is "very bright", without perhaps appreciating that it is the intensity of light that has illuminated a century of artistic endeavour and wonder in the north of Mallorca. The light is very bright, so much so that it is a mystery why not everyone wears cataract-preventing sunshades. Artists of bygone eras did not have the benefits of the technology of polarisation; Monet, it is reckoned, created his later impressionism because of a colour-blindness, the result of cataracts.

The tradition of art, especially in Pollensa, stretches back to the late nineteenth century and to the early years of the last century and to two non-Mallorcan artists - Anglada Camarasa (from Barcelona) and Tito Cittadini who was Argentinian. To return to a previous theme on this blog, Camarasa's memory has been preserved well by a street name - the main promenade in Puerto Pollensa bears the Camarasa eponym. Cittadini has fared less well, an undistinguished street in Pollensa and a road that gives way to a "camí" across the finca land between Barcares and Bonaire.

But both stand as equals in the art history of Pollensa. They were involved with the founding of a Pollensa "school", itself a form of artistic development based on post-impressionism and Fauvism which favoured more intense colour over lighter shades. Intensity and light, the visitor who remarks about brightness is maybe close to the truth. It is the combination of light intensity and the vividness caused by the brightness that has shone through the Pollensa school, successors including Dionís Bennàssar, after whom a museum is named, and Antoni Marquet Pasqual, both of them natives of Pollensa.

Landscape and the variety and richness of colours captured by the light are the stuff of much local painting. One can find these still in works by artists hanging in the various galleries in Pollensa and the port. Perhaps the single most photographed and painted piece of Pollensa is the promontory of the "Cavall Bernat" in Cala San Vicente, with its sharply defined shadow of a horse set against the blueness of sea and sky. Elsewhere, the primary pigments have been given expression on canvas, the shades of reds and yellows that have also decorated walls of houses. The neutrality of white and grey of some new architecture, for example in Puerto Pollensa, may bear the stamp of contemporariness but it is a betrayal of the palette and the brushstrokes that have recorded the essence of light and colour in and around Pollensa. The local textile craft of Marti Vicenç is a brilliance of these colours, the purples, reds and yellows the woven tribute to the differing vibrancies of bougainvillaea, save perhaps for the white blooms.

Light. And it is light at this time of the year that can be especially intense. In summer, certainly after around 11 or 12 in the morning, a haze can descend. If you have ever gone to the top of the mountain overlooking Puerto Alcúdia, as I have, to take photos, you have to go early. But in early spring, the light is fierce as the sky is so clear.

Light has been taken to create images and to market buildings, some quite inappropriate. With all due respect to Sunderland, a Stadium of Light is about the last thing one might have associated with the north-east. In and around Pollensa, by contrast, the natural environment requires no such artificial branding - it is its own stadium of light.


QUIZ
Yesterday - "Words", The Christians. Today's title - sort of right up to date, though the subjects of this yet to be released film are now in their '60s. Who?

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