TINSQUO (pronounced “tinz’ kwo”) is a continual, real-time performance in blog form of the working process of an artist. The project is authored by New York painter Mark Roth. Janna Olson is the site’s editor and co-curator.
The name TINSQUO is short for "There Is No Status Quo." It is a recognition that as creative entities we invent the world - and our experience of it - moment by moment.
The blog is evolving to present an expanding mix of artists and their own unique processes, making a space that can nurture a creative community online, becoming a hub for open-source artmaking and collaborative public projects.
an experiment in process
TINSQUO’s artblog format offers multiple points of entry into artistic process:
• The latest drawings and acrylic paintings are posted day-by-day, filling thumbnail galleries charting development of concerns and artistic vocabulary.
• “Process Posts” present “behind the scenes” glimpses into the mechanics of free play and vocabulary refinement.
• Time-lapse digital videos record the start-to-finish evolution of each oil painting.
• Writings offer a mix of reviews, web discoveries and quotidian particulars.
• Public Projects extend the mission of creative advocacy beyond the province of the blog, building toward community artmaking.
the creative narrative: a process within process
The posts of drawings and acrylic paintings are in-the-moment answers to the question, “so, what do I need to see?”
Once in the digital environment, these drawings and paintings often resurface as constituent elements of digital compositions. Those compositions become constituent elements of other digital paintings.
These virtual paintings then serve as the basis for oil paintings, acting akin to the cartoons of old - when full-scale works were executed in preparation for frescoes and tapestries.
The oil paintings are the lodestar towards which all this fractal complexity drives. Charting this long-term developmental process is the narrative unfolding on TINSQUO.
collecting experience
Every complete work embarks on a life of its own. Patron and painter meet as viewers and become collaborators.
In this collaboration, we are each sustained by an artwork in the manner with which we pay it our attention. It's expenditures of this kind that drive the economy of beauty.
Works featured on TINSQUO are available to all for collection - both as originals and archival inkjet prints. In embracing any work of art, you become an artist of your own experience. This is the aim of collecting with There Is No Status Quo.
