About the artist and her work
Kate Lewis is a painter and illustrator whose work belongs to a contemporary re-reading of interior painting, where the domestic space ceases to be a backdrop and becomes a true pictorial stage. Drawn from lived interiors and everyday surroundings, her paintings seek less to describe a room than to reveal its chromatic and poetic resonance.
Like painters such as Henri Matisse and Vanessa Bell, Lewis treats the interior as a site of visual intensity — a place where color, pattern, and light structure experience rather than merely depict it. Windows, doors, and glimpses of gardens recur as quiet thresholds, mediating between interior and exterior, intimacy and openness, memory and projection.
These passages transform the home into a mental scene, inhabited by light and by the gaze. Brightness is never neutral; it is conceived as a compositional element that shapes atmosphere and directs attention.
Lewis lives and works in Tennessee, where her studio practice is grounded in observation, repetition, and sustained looking.
Process and materials
Recurring motifs — bookshelves dense with color, patterned textiles, tiled floors, bouquets on a table, familiar objects — form a visual language across Lewis’s work. What might first appear ornamental instead asserts the aesthetic dignity of decor, which has long been relegated to a secondary role within painting.
In this regard, her work shares an affinity with that of Lois Dodd, particularly in its ability to make the everyday vibrate with quiet intensity. Domestic elements are not treated as anecdotal details, but as structural components of the image — carriers of rhythm, color, and meaning.
Lewis’s compositions are deliberately frontal, with flattened perspective and carefully held surfaces. The viewer is not invited to enter the room but to contemplate its surface, like a tapestry or textile. This refusal of depth produces a suspended temporality: the rooms appear emptied of human presence, yet remain saturated with signs of habitation, domestic memory distilled into a more universal experience.
Lewis works primarily in acrylic on canvas and in watercolor on paper, building layered images in which color, pattern, texture, and light carry meaning alongside subject.
Illustrated publications
Alongside her studio practice, Kate illustrates books that extend her engagement with drawing, observation, and everyday life. These projects translate her way of seeing into longer, sequential forms, combining illustration with narrative and reflection.
She has illustrated Artists in Residence, The Secret Garden, and The Italian Summer Kitchen. Her forthcoming book, Quiet Moments: A Guided Sketchbook, will be published in April.
Prints and original works
Limited editions are produced in small runs and available for a short time.
Art prints are created from original paintings and offered as open or limited editions, depending on the work.
Morning Find Sketches are original watercolor paintings released monthly in small quantities.
Original paintings on canvas are represented by Sobering Galerie and available through Artsy.