Kirsten Todd has been painting since she was a child, though it took a 30-year career in graphic design before she came fully back to her own artistic voice. Based in Lancashire, she's now an award-winning painter known for contemporary portraits that explore the human form, our connection to one another, and the quieter, harder-to-name things - energy, vibration, presence.
Working mainly in acrylics, Kirsten describes her process as a kind of moving meditation. She works instinctively, building up each portrait through spontaneous brushwork, palette knife marks and colour, letting the figure find its own shape rather than forcing it. You can often still see the abstract background peeking through the finished piece, a reminder that her subjects were never meant to exist in isolation.
Her work has picked up plenty of recognition along the way, including the British Art Prize Acrylic Award and the Galeria Moderna London Invitational Art Contest, plus a finalist spot in the Society of Women Artists Open. But talk to Kirsten and it's clear the accolades aren't really the point. What matters to her is painting women as they actually are: strong and soft, complicated and beautiful, entirely their own.
About her practice
Kirsten Todd's artistic practice is rooted in energy, emotion and the sense that we're all more connected than we realise. Working across her figurative paintings, she explores balance, empowerment and healing, aiming to capture not just what her subjects look like but what they carry - the strength, the softness, the moments of vulnerability that make someone feel real.
Each painting begins intuitively, built up in layers until the figure and the background start to merge, so her subjects feel held within the space around them rather than separate from it. It's a technique that suits the women she paints: strong, but never one-note. Powerful, but never without softness.
Kirsten describes her work as a way of honouring women in all their complexity - their resilience, their beauty beyond convention, their contradictions. It's this belief in strength and softness existing together that runs through everything she makes, and it's exactly why she felt like the right fit for One of a Kind, a gallery built to champion women artists telling women's stories.
“My paintings are an invitation to see strength in softness, beauty in diversity, and unity in our shared journey.” – Kirsten Todd
