Painting as condition

I dont wish to sound the alarm bells with Daily Mail like headlines, but I can't help thinking there is some form of condition that drives certain people to paint. Despite many more sensible, logical, fruitful or obvious avenues a large number of people over the years have taken to using sticky fluids filled with pigments to create patterns and images across stretched white fabrics. These few people perform an act which seems so profound to them but so vacuous adn poitnelss to so many other. Despite protestations to the contary painting is still an elitist pursuit. Ask you average punter there views on music and the chances are your ear will be cehwed off untill a bloddy hole is left at the side of your head. Ask the same ian two pence worth and he will look at you with profound disinterest. I might sound cyncial but I have a few bright, interested and non tunnel visioned friends for whom painting is as meaningful as ........ (im too tired to think or enter something amusingly uninteresting)

it strikes me, therefore, and I pose the question not the answer, that painting must actually be a condition of sorts. That there is some kind of neurosis which drives us to squeeze out this bits of colour and dispense them over two dimesnions with orgasmic and self indulgant delight and despair. (largely the later, which makes our desire to continue even moire bizarre) I have been thinking refcently how I really wish I did not paint, how I would much prefer a simple option, a more systemmatic and linear progression to measure development. But it does not seem to stop me following pretentious dead ends which revolve around pastes and hues.

It has led me to believe I need to read Elkins 'What Painting is' again. It is a bizarre and interesting book which I only read in broken fragments first time around. He compares painting to alchemy. It is part of a common contemporary strain of literature which uses such comparisons as a methodological tool to get to tackle the issue of there central concern. It is the use of one discipline as a knife the messy and bloody ontological disputes of another. In this case it works. He gets, from memroy, to the point that there is something about the medium itself and the process of its application (beyond any more specific, mimetic or philosophical reason) that has made painting a continuous but peripheral obsession of humanity.

once I have re-read this book i will try and take a step back and reevaluate some of the points I have raised above.

In hindsight, the above few paragraphs could have been written in three sentences. Oh well.