It turns out you shouldn't just call it a mountain...

Greetings,

Free-thinking, free-conscienced, beautiful people.

Continuing to look through the mirror of art…

Today, a mountain appears to us from the mirror of art….

Are you saying, where did this mountain come from?

They didn't just appear out of nowhere; our planet, which is four and a half billion years old, began giving birth to them seven hundred million years ago.

Or are you asking, which one, considering twenty-four percent of the Earth is made up of mountains?

We will come to which one later, my dear friends…

Also, we have an immortal mountain, 

But do you know it? Let's assume you do.

Our ancestors, who lived thousands of years ago, have performed rituals of worshipping mountains or viewing them as sacred from a spiritual or religious perspective since prehistoric times.

If you ask why our ancestors sanctified mountains like this, don't worry—well, actually, do worry… There is an answer to that too, dear friends…

These forms of worship, accepted as primitive beliefs, are based on the belief system our ancestors developed while in the animistic stage of belief, which held that everything they perceived in nature had a soul. Therefore, mountains also have a soul, and this soul possesses a power born from the magnitude that mountains possess. When moving from the animistic stage of belief to the polytheistic stage, mountains became sacred homes where gods and goddesses lived, as in Ancient Greek Mythology. In monotheistic religions, mountains were accepted as the places closest to the sky—that is, the places furthest from the worldly and closest to the divine—and centers of faith, such as monasteries, were built on their peaks. 

Thus, it was thought that the soul could build a sinless life by purifying itself from the pleasures and desires of the material world, and in this way, the soul could enter into deep contemplation and turn more toward the Divine and find peace.

Now, some dear readers will rightly ask this question: is it really necessary to live on a mountaintop for a sinless life… I feel like you are thinking, what does this have to do with art, Professor… Anyway, maybe I am wrong…

I will leave the answer to the first part of the question to you, my dear readers, and save myself, sir. 

But I take it as a duty to answer the part about art.

Above, when I said contemplation, I meant understanding, grasping, internal questioning, and creating a new meaning from all of these. Thus, for artistic creativity to emerge, I meant performing an imaginative process on the objects of focus that allow us to carry out this act of deep thinking, and on everything we perceive and experience from them.

In order to turn the act of looking into the act of seeing intellectually, there must be an awareness of the thing we see, which we have encoded in our minds from the past. This awareness—that is, assigning a meaning to that thing beforehand—requires us to perform an act of thought within its own context so that an image of that thing, its context, and its wholeness can be formed in our minds. This image must be formed in our minds so that we can abstract the thing that forms the basis for constructing our image and make it a possibility for a new way of seeing and perceiving, starting from a new reality based on our intellect.

It is worth remembering what John Berger, the author of Ways of Seeing, said: “Our image is our way of seeing.”

In other words, you may be looking at a mountain, but in the output of seeing that emerges in the multi-layered process of seeing fed by the practice of thinking about what you are looking at, what you see may no longer be a mountain; it may be your image.

Let's look through the window of our soul, what do you say? 

The mountain and seclusion, turning inward to know oneself, the magnetic pull that draws people to the mountain—a pull created by the religious and intellectual heritage of our genetic legacy coming from thousands of years ago in the collective unconscious. And if these people are artists, you can imagine what will overflow from their creative image…

Oh, dear friends, don't mountains pull us to them as well? Don't we get drawn to them? Have you felt it somewhere deep in your soul… That mystical energy… We are in the midst of a formation and flow that is tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years old. Our roots are always pulling us to them; we go to the mountains to paint, but perhaps our primitive beliefs, which still continue to live deep within us, are pulling us to them and manifesting themselves as art.

Anyway, it would be better if we got to the point…

We said there is a mountain in the mirror of art. Now we have come to the foothills of that mountain. We can show the possibilities of what that mountain can turn into in an artist's creative image as a result of their deep focus and thinking.

Are you saying, enough, Professor, show us that mountain already? Here you go, sir. The mountain you see in the photo below is the mountain that will midwife revolutionary changes and developments in the art of painting. Its name is Mont Sainte-Victoire, and it is located in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region in the south of France.

“Mont Sainte-Victoire Mountain”

Well, Professor, aren't you going to ask who saw the possibility that would deeply affect the art of painting in this mountain, who made it the subject of something other than itself, and who constructed their way of seeing in their image?

You will ask, of course.

But I will not answer in this article.

We said curiosity is good, didn't we? I remember correctly.

I will reveal all the secrets in our next article…

And as you learn the secrets, you will say, wow… It really is true that “you shouldn't just call it a mountain,” and that to see the possibility within it, we had to change our way of seeing.

Then you will head to the mountains to see the possibility within yourselves. Take it from me, don't say I didn't tell you later.

Until our next meeting, goodbye for now; breathe with art, stay with art, now and always.