Artist and Founder of KV Tiles
Katherine Verdickt is a painter and ceramic tile artist based in Farmington, Connecticut. Her practice moved from oil painting to ceramic tile over time, not as a shift in direction but as an expansion of it. Glazing ceramic surfaces requires its own discipline: indirect, chemically complex, and shaped as much by alchemy as by the artist’s hand. That combination of painting, process, and continual experimentation is what gives each project its distinctive character.
Before KV Tiles existed as a studio, Katherine worked as a commissioned artist, creating paintings for private collectors and institutions. That foundation shapes how she reads a space and develops a concept. It also shapes how she works with clients and designers through a process that resembles an art commission more than a tile order.
Where the Delft Tradition Comes In
Katherine’s connection to Dutch and Netherlandish art runs through her family history and her academic work in equal measure. She grew up spending time in the Low Countries, where historic hand painted tile was part of the architecture around her. That early familiarity deepened into serious study. Over two decades, she has researched early Netherlandish painting and the Dutch Golden Age, periods whose draftsmanship, surface quality, and relationship to everyday objects directly inform how she works today.
When Katherine renovated her own Dutch Colonial home in 2020 and began making tiles for it, she was drawing on years of painting practice and art historical knowledge. The commissions that followed grew naturally from that base.
Education
Katherine studied Illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design (B.F.A., 2009). During the same years, she pursued art history coursework at Brown University, including a formative seminar on 17th-century Dutch painting. She completed an M.F.A. in Fine Arts at the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2014, followed by an M.A. from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2022. She is currently planning further study in glaze and clay body chemistry at Harvard University.