Looking over Leo O’Donnell’s shoulder and the Tramuntana is already there, perfectly framed in the window of his Sóller home studio. Yet the mountains outside are only the first impression. On his walls and worktables, their limestone faces, ancient olive trees and half-hidden paths have been dismantled and rebuilt in ink: bolder, more expressive and crowded with detail. Born in Derry and trained in illustration, Leo discovered relief printmaking at university in Plymouth, but moving to Mallorca in 2014 gave him his enduring subject. A decade later, his hand-printed linocuts offer more than views of the island. They hold the experience of walking through it, slowly enough for its shapes and stories to reveal themselves.
“Everything begins with a walk”
Reading the mountain
Everything begins with a walk. Leo leaves home with a sketchbook, watching for strong shapes: the abrupt edge of a peak, a contorted olive tree, a trail vanishing into shadow. “I can leave my door and, within 20 minutes in any direction, find a brand-new view,” he says.
He draws quickly on location, but the detail is added later at his studio table. Linocut is graphic and bold, and Leo responds to the Tramuntana with hard lines, dense textures and deep colour. Familiar places take on another energy. Trees twist; mountains loom; small signs of life appear between rocks and terraces. He finds drama and beauty in the landscape’s hard edges rather than trying to soften them.
There is humour here too. Alongside villages and peaks, Leo is drawn to Mallorca’s language, food and natural history. The Myotragus, a goat no larger than a cat that once existed only on the Balearic Islands, becomes an engaging character. Other pieces play with Mallorcan expressions and a newcomer’s linguistic misunderstandings. His background in illustration remains alive in this playful world, preventing the landscape from becoming merely picturesque.
The thrill of the reveal
At his workbench, drawing gives way to something slower and less forgiving. Leo transfers the composition to lino and cuts it by hand. Every removed line is final. “There’s no room for error. If I cut a line, it’s gone. I can’t replace it.”
His colour works make that risk greater. One block is printed repeatedly and carved further after each colour. Pale blue may come first, followed by green, ochre and dark brown. With every layer, the previous version of the block disappears. “I can have an image in my head, but I go through all these steps and it’s not until the last second, when I peel back the paper, that I know what I’ve done.”
Sometimes the result matches the picture in his mind; sometimes it goes further; sometimes it fails. He loves that uncertainty. His recent TRAMUNTANA exhibition at Museu de Sóller brought visitors into this private journey, placing tools, drawings and altered blocks beside the finished prints.
Winning the 2025 Artists of Mallorca competition gave Leo confidence in his chosen path. For years, he balanced art with work in restaurants and cafés, making prints in the hours that remained. The award felt like permission to take a leap of faith and keep going.
Mallorca has also taught him to move differently. He remembers arriving with the urge to rush, then learning to move through life in first gear and observe. That attentiveness runs through every carved mark. “I want people to feel the area,” he says. “I’m just trying to do the landscape justice.” His prints show us not simply how the Tramuntana looks, but how it feels to pass through it.
Text by Ché Miller | Photos by Jonatan Barzola
