Unleashing Your Creative Journey — Finding Your Voice as an Australian Artist

Every artist I know has a version of this story.

You start making things. You look at other people's work and wonder how they got there. You copy, experiment, abandon whole directions, start again. You have moments where something clicks — and long stretches where nothing does.

That's not failure. That's the creative journey.

I'm Kirsten Katz — an Australian artist and surface designer based in Sydney. I make modern botanical and abstract wall art, homewares and gifts. I've spent years building a creative practice that is recognisably mine. And none of it happened quickly.

This is what I've learned.

A creative practice is not optional

The biggest shift in my creative journey came when I stopped treating studio time as something I'd get to when everything else was done. The emails, the orders, the admin — all of it came first. And painting came last, which meant it often didn't happen at all.

When you paint regularly — even imperfectly, even when you don't feel like it — things start to happen. You stop overthinking and start responding. Your hand gets faster. Your eye gets sharper. The gap between what you can see in your head and what you can put on paper starts to close.

A creative practice is the foundation of every artist's journey. Everything else — the collections, the style, the confidence — builds on top of it. Set the hours. Protect them. Show up even when inspiration doesn't.

Exploring mediums changed everything

I started with watercolour. Then acrylics. Then mixed media — layering paint with mark-making and drawing. Each new medium taught me something I couldn't have learned any other way.

Watercolour taught me to let go. You can't control it completely and if you try you kill it. Acrylics gave me boldness — the ability to paint over, push colour, commit to a mark. Mixed media gave me a freedom I hadn't expected. The ability to build up layers, add texture, work back into the surface.

The collections I'm most proud of came from that experimentation. Flowers of Oz grew from a period of working boldly with strong mark-making and layered colour. Protea Magnifica came from painting loosely with soft washes and building up layers. Neither happened by following a formula. Both happened by following curiosity.

Don't be afraid to try something that feels unfamiliar. The discomfort is part of the creative journey — it's where the growth lives.

Flowers of Oz — Kirsten's first collection and the one that felt unmistakably hers. Explore the collection →

Finding your artistic voice takes longer than you think

The question I get asked most is: how do I find my style?

My honest answer is that you don't find it. You build it. Slowly, through repetition, through editing, through making hundreds of things and keeping the ones that feel true and discarding the ones that don't.

I spent years making work that was influenced by artists I admired. That's not a bad thing — studying other artists is how you learn. But at some point the influences have to give way to something that is genuinely yours. Something that can't be mistaken for anyone else's work.

For me that shift came when I stopped trying to make art that looked like what I thought I was supposed to make, and started making art that came from somewhere real — from the Australian landscape, from colour relationships that moved me, from the particular way native botanicals sit in light.

Flowers of Oz was my first collection and the first body of work that felt unmistakably mine. The palette, the energy, the way each piece carries colour and life — it came from genuine connection rather than imitation.

Your creative journey is your own. It won't look like anyone else's. That's the whole point.

Practice, fail, keep going

Behind every piece of work I'm proud of are dozens of drawings, initial paintings and experimental pieces that came before it. There are paintings that went wrong, directions that didn't come together, and months spent following an idea that ultimately wasn't mine to keep.

That's not wasted time. All of it built something. The failures taught me more than the successes — they showed me where my instincts were off, where I was forcing something that didn't want to exist.

If you're in the middle of that uncertainty right now — keep going. The work you make today is building the foundation for the work you'll make in five years. You can't see it yet. But it's happening.

Show up. Make things. Stay curious. That's the creative journey.

If you'd like to see where the creative journey has led — the collections, the originals, the work that came from years of showing up in the studio — you can explore it all at kirstenkatz.com.

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