How Colour and Art Can Shift Your Mood — An Australian Artist's Perspective

There is a moment that happens in the studio that I have never quite been able to explain.

I walk in feeling flat — distracted, heavy, the kind of tired that isn't really about sleep. And then I pick up a brush. I mix a colour. Something warm, or something bold. And within minutes, something shifts.

It's not magic. It's not even particularly mysterious. But it is real. And it has been happening for as long as I have been making art.

I'm Kirsten Katz — an Australian artist and surface designer based in Sydney. I make modern botanical and abstract wall art, homewares and gifts. Colour is at the centre of everything I do. It's not decorative for me. It's intentional. It's how I think, how I work, and increasingly, how I understand the way we all feel in our spaces and our lives.

This post is about positivity. But not the version that tells you to think happy thoughts and make a list. The real kind. The kind that lives in what you surround yourself with, what you make, and what you choose to look at every single day.

Native Garden Floral Wall Art Print — modern botanical art designed to bring colour and life into your home. Shop Botanical Wall Art →

Colour does something to us

This is not opinion. Researchers have studied the psychological effects of colour for decades. Warm tones — pinks, ambers, corals — tend to energise. Softer botanical greens and blues create calm. Bold, saturated colour draws the eye and holds it. There's a reason we feel differently in certain rooms.

In my own work, I rarely plan a colour palette in advance. I respond to what's in front of me — the paper, the light, the mood of the day. Sometimes I reach for a hot pink because it feels urgent and alive. Sometimes I layer dusty sage and raw umber because that's what the painting needs. The colours I choose aren't random, but they're not calculated either. They come from somewhere instinctive.

What I've noticed over years of painting is that the works that carry the most energy — the ones that sell quickly as originals, and the art prints that keep selling month after month, year after year — are the ones that came freely. Not forced. Not planned to within an inch of their life. They're the pieces I made when I was deep in the studio, painting intuitively, following an idea wherever it wanted to go. Protea Magnifica, with its soft pastels. Flowers of Oz. Garden of Eden. The Colour Pop series. Different in mood and palette, but all made the same way — with genuine curiosity and no agenda. My customer favourites aren't always the boldest or the brightest. They're the ones that are unmistakably mine. People feel the difference. That energy transfers. I genuinely believe that.

What you choose to look at every day matters

Your home is the most constant visual environment you have. You wake up in it. You eat in it. You wind down in it. The walls, the kitchen bench, the hallway — these things form the backdrop of your daily life, and most people give them very little thought.

I think about this a lot when I'm designing a new collection or deciding which paintings to release as prints. The question I keep coming back to is: how does this feel to live with? Not just to look at once, but every single day for years.

Art that lifts you — really lifts you — tends to have a few things in common. It has colour with intention. It has energy without being overwhelming. It connects to something in nature or memory or feeling that you already carry. It doesn't shout. It resonates.

That's what I'm trying to make. Not decorative filler. Art that genuinely changes how a room feels and, by extension, how you feel in it.

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Creativity as a daily practice

You don't have to be an artist to experience what I'm describing. But I do think there is something in the act of making — even small, imperfect, unfinished making — that is genuinely restorative.

In my own practice, I've learned that the days I paint are better days. Not because everything goes right in the studio. Often it doesn't. Paintings go wrong, colours fight each other, ideas don't land. But the act of showing up, picking up the brush, and making marks on paper — that alone does something for my state of mind that nothing else quite replicates.

There's a truth I've come back to again and again: play is not optional. It's where the best work lives. The paintings I'm most proud of, the ones that surprise me, are almost always the ones that came from genuine curiosity rather than a plan. That kind of openness — letting yourself be absorbed in something — is one of the most positive states a person can be in.

If you're not a painter, find your equivalent. The making matters more than what you make.

Surrounding yourself with art you actually love

There's a version of decorating that's about matching. Finding something that fits the sofa. Filling the wall because it needs to be filled. I understand it. But it doesn't create the shift I'm talking about.

The shift comes when you choose something you genuinely respond to. Something that stops you. Something that, three years after you hang it, you still notice.

That's the standard I hold my own work to. If I wouldn't want to look at it every day, I don't release it.

If you're looking for art that brings genuine colour and energy into your home — modern botanical prints, abstract works, or homewares designed around original paintings — you can explore the full collection below.

Explore all Australian Art Prints  ·  Original Paintings  ·  About Kirsten