Being incompetent may be a good thing, if you do it artfully.
Every one of my art styles started with a deep feeling of incompetence. I’ve learned to treat that as the beginning rather than the reason to stop. Not just for art.
A deliberately quiet week. So I can build and write stuff. My learning platform for my F2F classes now has close to 20 exercises with real AI testing libraries. I am now 70% through an online course on AI risk management. Developed based on what I have learnt thus far. And I’ve improved jobaq.me so it can now be tailored to any organization’s context for AI competency testing. Along the way I did a talk on AI agents for GARP buy-side risk managers, and had a discussion with a public sector institute on AI for policy folks. And somewhere in the middle of all that, a new watercolor style appeared. Which is what this piece is about.
On how being artfully incompetent is not just useful for creative pursuits, but also independent life.
My Styles Over 2 Decades
I have had roughly six distinct styles across twenty years of making art.
The first was panoramic street photography with a melancholic feel. Early 2000s. Empty spaces, quiet corridors, the texture of places about to change. I was obsessed with documenting what was disappearing before it did. The camera was the tool. The melancholy was the filter.
Then came the loose line drawings. Messy but detailed. A completely different mode and a completely different tool. I loved the practice of making mark after mark, whether on a digital canvas or paper.
Then the whimsical colorful illustrations with a touch of longing. This one arrived through a period when my kid was in and out of the hospital, and I whiled away nights with a tablet and nothing else to do. Singapore evenings. Weird back alleys. This led to a commercial practice. Prints for sale at Singapore souvenir shops. Canvas versions in art galleries. Mr Kiasu books. Commissions for Tatler and Wallpaper. Each one took hours of layering detail on detail. The style looked precise from the outside. From the inside it was controlled chaos.
Then watercolors of buildings. Starting normally, trying to do what watercolor is supposed to do. Washes. Wet on wet. The architecture rendered faithfully. It started when I was bored after graduating from my PhD studies, and spent a few weeks with Ong Kim Seng.
Then slowly the whimsical digital sensibility crept in. The colors got stranger. The lines got looser. The buildings started to look like they belonged in the same world as the digital illustrations rather than a faithful record of the real thing. I essentially started to heck it when it comes to watercolor conventions.
And this week, something new. Reversing the John Harris style. Harris paints epic architectural visions in darks with loose confident strokes and a splash of color. I tried doing the opposite - taking his compositional instincts and running them through a more whimsical palette. More Singapore than space opera. Still figuring out if it works.
Why Incompetence?
Every single one of these transitions started with a deep feeling of incompetence.
The panoramic photography felt like I was imitating photographers I admired without understanding what made them good. The line drawings felt like I was producing something messy when I wanted something precise. The whimsical digital felt too colorful, too loose, not serious enough. The watercolors felt like I was fighting the medium rather than working with it. The John Harris reversal this week felt like I had no idea what I was doing.
That feeling has never gone away. It arrives at the start of every new style. And I have learnt to live with it.
But artfully.
I don’t copy a style directly. Gen AI can do it.
What I do. Observe something that produces a feeling. Sit with it long enough to understand what specifically is producing that feeling. Then try to find my own version of it. Not the technique. The underlying feel.
When I tried the John Harris reversal this week I wasn’t trying to paint like John Harris. I was trying to understand what he sees when he imagines a city and then find what I see instead.
The other thing I’ve learned. Get it out there. Good or bad. Piece after piece.
I post the art. Good or bad. Week after week. The ones that don’t work are as important as the ones that do.
There’s no need to be embarrassed about learning in public. I’m learning, after all. And what’s the risk? That someone thinks that my art looks like crap? So what.
The Connection to Independent Life
Thirty five weeks ago I left MAS without a plan. What followed was a deep feeling of incompetence in a different domain.
New rooms. New formats. New relationships. New things being built without knowing exactly what they would become. The same feeling that arrives at the start of every new style arrived at the start of every new week.
The lesson from twenty years of finding styles has helped. The incompetence is not an obstacle. It is the signal that something different is being attempted. The alternative, staying inside the familiar, refining what you already know, produces a narrow competence, and a dead end.
And so that to me, is artful incompetence. It means choosing the new thing even when you can’t do it yet. Observing what produces a feeling. Finding your own version of it. Getting it out there before it’s ready.
And doing it again the next week. And looking back to absorb the lessons.
#ArtfullyIncompetent #Art #IndependentLife #Watercolor #Transitions #Reflections