Or: why do we paint? Why do we do what do? Where's the sense in painting a picture/ producing art? We produce art almost automatically; when an artwork is finished we quickly make the next one without even thinking about why we are doing this.

Otto Rank (psychoanalyst and a pupil of Freud) once gave a possible theory on the "creative urge". He said that mankind had a profound need to overcome the dualism between body and spirit, soul and matter. In the end, Rank claimed, the creative urge is there to help cope with mortality. The "urge for immortality" aims at vanquishing death by reproduction as well as by creating cultural values.
[Krieger, Verena. Was ist ein Künstler? Genie – Heilsbringer – Antikünstler. Eine Ideen- und Kunstgeschichte des Schöpferischen. Köln 2007, p. 122 f.]

Does this mean we create art in order to become immortal? Considering the huge amount of contemporary artists and the slight selection art history makes, this seems to be some kind of Sisyphean task. And if one stays true to oneself thereby remains undecided. But supposedly every artist has flirted with this naïve, a little emotive, almost romantic idea (secretly, openly, all the time, a long time ago).

"Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?" Yes, every single human being probably craves not to have lived in vain on this planet; they want to bequeath something great, something that makes them forget their nothingness. An especially beautiful example is given by Virginia Woolf in her novel "To the Lighthouse". Mr Ramsay is thinking about his life; he is thinking about how much he has already achieved in his life. He would like to be a genius and he actually is really intelligent (professor I think), but he just can't make it any farther than the letter Q. This is about a scale of genius he has constructed according to the alphabet; with every letter the genius increases. And Mr. Ramsay is bothered at the thought of being stuck at Q. The following excerpt (and actually the whole book) is worth reading:

„He had not genius; he laid no claim to that: but he had, or might have had, the power to repeat every letter of the alphabet from A to Z accurately in order. Meanwhile, he stuck at Q. On, then, on to R. […] He stood stock-still, by the urn, with the geranium flowing over it. How many men in a thousand million, he asked himself, reach Z after all? Surely the leader of a forlorn hope may ask himself that and answer, without treachery to the expedition behind him, "One perhaps." One in a generation. Is he to be blamed then if he is not that one? Provided he has toiled honestly, given to the best of his power, and till he has no more left to give? And his fame lasts how long? It is permissible even for a dying hero to think before he dies how men will speak of him hereafter. His fame lasts perhaps two thousand years. And what are two thousand years? (asked Mr. Ramsay ironically, staring at the hedge). What, indeed, if you look from a mountain top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare. His own little light would shine, not very brightly, for a year or two, and would then be merged in some bigger light, and that in a bigger still. […] Who shall blame him? Who will not secretly rejoice when the hero puts his armour off, and halts by the window and gazes at his wife and son, who, very distant at first, gradually come closer and closer, till lips and book and head are clearly before him, though still lovely and unfamiliar from the intensity of his isolation and the waste of ages and the perishing of the stars, and finally putting his pipe in his pocket and bending his magnificent head before her – who will blame him if he does homage to the beauty of the world?"

[Woolf, Virginia. To the lighthouse. Penguin Popular Classics. London et al. 1966, p. 55-57.]