Quantity Control - A musing

It is now time to move on to the next painting and I seem to have come up against one of my "Oh-what's-the-point?" frames of mind. Just because you can does'nt mean that you should just bang out yet another painting. In these uncertain times when paintings that should normally sell are not, is there any point in banging out another unless it has something to say? The world seems stuffed to the gills with paintings to me, sometimes they are just  paintings by artists that seem to just churn them out - for instance landscapes painted quickly in a loose "painterly" fashion of which there now seems to be zillions, one artists' work being indistinguishable from another because that literally is the "fashion" of what much landscape art should look like these days. Well OK you can say that Art is therapy, particularly as far as the artist is concerned as in my case when I realised a year ago that I need to paint pictures to keep myself feeling positive and alive.....but should that be enough of a reason to foist yet more of them onto an unconcerned world? I think we need to exert Quantity control as well as well Quality control on what we produce. For example I could have started a painting straight after completion of the last one, it would have turned out alright but essentially it just would have been more "stock" that would lie around in my studio and remain unsold, assuming that is that it had even made it as far as a gallery wall in the first place - I have a lot of them already! A painting has to stand out from the crowd these days, it needs to be considered, have something to say and dare I say it, be beautiful in some way. By just standing back for a while and not jumping straight in to another painting willy nilly surely then there is the time to hone the elements of composition, colour, subject and concept into the painting that will then have real quality and power that will lift it above the ordinary so that it it is what it is meant to be, Art not Product......or is it a case of "Shut up Mark and get on with painting!"?