Ndesign: Kate Lewis

This winter, a couple dozen paintings are crisscrossing the art world, making stops at exhibitions in Luxembourg, Miami and Los Angeles, and waving at a gallery in Paris along the way. Covered in brightly hued acrylic, these canvases depict vibrant rooms that recall the crowded and controlled energy of interiors by French painters Pierre Bonnard and Henri Matisse. But there is something uniquely Tennessean about these works, which started their global path in the studio of artist Kate Lewis, inside a 19th-century log cabin in Williamson County.

Originally from Halls in West Tennessee, artist Kate Lewis moved back to her home state during the pandemic. After two decades in Chicago — where she earned her master’s at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and worked at its museum before pursuing her own art full-time — she lured her husband and four children to Franklin to be closer to family. They bought a historic house with an attached log cabin, which became the perfect art studio.

“There’s something really magical about working in the historic cabin,” Kate says. “I can’t put it into words.” Lately, she’s been busy turning words into images, illustrating books with her energetic watercolors of still lifes, interiors, and vistas looking through windows toward the outdoors.   

In 2021, after pandemic-related delays, the book Artists in Residence hit the shelves. Alongside text by Melissa Wyse, Kate’s illustrations depict the homes of 17 iconic artists, including Georgia O’Keeffe, Jean-Michel Basquiat and, of course, Matisse, whose loose and bright rhythms of pattern and color rhyme with Kate’s own style almost a century later.

Then Kate told her editor she would love to illustrate a storybook — something like The Secret Garden, for example. “I wanted to immerse myself in a story,” Kate says. As it turned out, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1911 tale of a sickly child who brings new life to a hidden garden and herself was already in the public domain. In 2024, Kate issued an updated version of the children’s novel, with enchanting illustrations of Misselthwaite Manor on the Yorkshire moors in England.

That same year, Kate mounted a rare local exhibition at Galerie Tangerine, where her large canvases of colorful and cozy book-lined rooms covered the walls of the tiny Wedgewood-Houston showroom. (For now, Kate’s paintings sell exclusively through Sobering Galerie in Paris.)

In summer 2025, Kate teamed up with cookbook author and James Beard Foundation Award-nominated chef Cathy Whims to publish The Italian Summer Kitchen: Timeless Recipes for La Dolce Vita, with 84 illustrations — ranging from plump prawns to il Duomo — in Kate’s signature style.  

This March, Kate will launch Quiet Moments: A Guided Sketchbook, a volume with watercolor and ink illustrations to prompt creative exercises and sketching rituals. The interactive journal began with Kate’s own daily exercise of “morning finds,” in which she starts the day by observing and drawing one simple thing.

While Kate’s morning might begin with her wandering outside to do quick watercolor sketches, she eventually makes her way back to her cabin, which is close to home and her busy family, but separate — somewhat like a secret garden. “I feel like I’m entering a different space,” Kate says. “I can disconnect from everyday life, to move into the creative world that I enter when I start painting.”