Why a Recognisable Style Matters When You Buy Original Art
People often ask me how I found my style — as though it's a thing you stumble across one day, fully formed.
I used to wonder that myself. It wasn't until someone on a licensing project looked at a batch of my work and said, "this is unmistakably yours," that I realised I even had one. What I actually had was thousands of hours of painting the same way — the same kind of brushstroke, the same way of shaping a petal — over and over, until it stopped being a technique and became just how my hand moves.
I think that's worth explaining, because it's actually the thing that makes an original piece worth buying.
Why a recognisable style matters to you, not just to me
When you buy something mass-produced — off a supermarket shelf, printed by a factory, generated by an algorithm — nobody thinks twice about it. It's interchangeable. If you don't love it, there are a thousand more just like it.
Original art works the opposite way. When a piece is genuinely, recognisably mine, you're not just buying a painting. You're buying something that could only have come from one person, built over years of doing the same thing until it became second nature.
That consistency is proof of something. Painting one flower well is one thing. Painting flowers in a way people can spot as unmistakably yours, across hundreds of pieces, for years, means the skill is real — not a lucky one-off, and not a trend jumped on because it was popular this season.
The artists who never settle
You've probably scrolled an artist's feed and noticed it: pet portraits, then an abstract phase, then landscapes, then watercolours, then chickens. Every piece chasing whatever's trending that month. It's not that any single piece is bad — it's that nothing has been done long enough, or consistently enough, to actually become theirs.
I've spent close to three decades doing one thing: painting flowers, my way, over and over, until the way I do it became unmistakable. Not because I couldn't do something else, but because this is genuinely what I do, and I've honed it long enough to know it's mine.
So when you buy a piece from me, that's what you're buying. Not just art — a genuine Kirsten Katz original, made by someone who has done this enough times, for long enough, to have earned the right to call it a style.
Curious what else goes into each piece? Read What Goes Into a Painting That Nobody Sees.
