About us
Hello. We’re Alex and Tricia, and between us we make Red Kite Artistry.
Alex
I paint. Abstract acrylics, mostly, and it starts with colour. There’s a plan, though it lives in my head rather than on paper, and how much of it survives contact with the canvas depends on what I’m making. Colour comes first either way, and everything else follows from there. Two shades sitting next to each other. The way texture catches the light. How a palette can make you think of a landscape without ever showing you one.
The work comes out of a love of nature, though I’m not trying to paint what it looks like. I’m after what it feels like: the patterns that repeat at every scale, and the colour relationships that make a place feel the way it does.
I came to this late, and not by a straight route. I spent years in the corporate world doing people analytics, which sounds about as far from painting as you can get. In some ways it was. But that job was about taking something complicated and turning it into a story, and I recognise that now in how I work on a canvas.
I’d been painting seriously for a few years, and at some point it became obvious that the thing I did at weekends was my passion. So I changed my life to fit it. Red Kite Artistry is what came out of that.
Tricia
I've led projects for twenty years, mostly big IT programmes, most of that time in New Zealand. People assume that means spreadsheets. It does involve spreadsheets. But the interesting part was always the same as it is here: working out what a thing actually needs to be, then getting a group of people to build it. I came back to the UK less than a year ago, which is its own kind of starting again.
What I do in our new world is take an idea and make it real by a date. The website, the collections, the money, the plan, the order it all has to happen in. Alex creates the artwork. I make sure it gets out of the studio and in front of people, finished and on time.
Us
We’re sisters. We’re both fairly introverted, so this is not a business built on charming a room. It’s built on the work being good and on saying what we mean.
The studio is in Hertfordshire, red kite country. The birds were nearly gone from Britain once and now they circle over the garden every day. That felt like the right thing to name a new beginning after.
If something here speaks to you, we’d love to hear from you.