Inside The City

Perfectly Simple
This Land Park artist is inspired by everyday things
By Kevin Mims



Every Sunday for the past year or so, The Sacramento Bee published “One Perfect Thing,” which combines a watercolor with a paragraph of related commentary. Both are the work of Land Park resident Kathrine Lemke Waste.

Each installment featured a still-life painting, usually of locally grown fruits or vegetables, but sometimes of a fully processed food, such as a jar of honey or a fruit tart, or maybe just a food-related item, such as a hand-woven marketing basket. Accompanying the watercolor is a brief, koanlike meditation on the painting’s subject. The painting of the basket, for instance, was accompanied by a text noting that reusable marketing baskets save “an estimated six shopping bags a week from ending up in our local landfill. That’s 288 bags a year . . . ”

One installment was titled “Ode to an Artichoke,” while another was captioned “A Study in Pumpkin and Cream,” both titles exemplifying the poetic quality of Waste’s work.

But “One Perfect Thing” was more than poetic. It often contains solid culinary information. A recent tribute to Meyer lemons informed readers, “A squeeze of Meyer lemon juice, with its hints of honey and thyme, adds a bright note to early crops of asparagus, artichokes and fava beans. Add the grated peel to tapenade, aïoli or herb butter to complement spring vegetables.”

The daughter of a naval officer, Waste was born at Camp Pendleton in southern California. Her childhood coincided with the war in Vietnam, which kept her father hopping from base to base: San Diego, Los Angeles, the Philippines.

Her parents had five children and not a lot of money, but they always saw to it that Kathrine had all the art supplies she needed. When she was in the second grade, she painted her first watercolor, a copy of a professional landscape painting. She still has a photo that her parents took of her with the painting, “holding it up to the camera and looking very proud of myself,” she says.

The family arrived in Sacramento when Waste was a sixth-grader. She stayed long enough to graduate from Sacramento State University with degrees in communication and theater. After that came a 15-year stint in academia, most of which she spent at Chico State, where she taught communication and theater while her husband, Bob, taught political science and public policy. Waste and her husband returned to Sacramento in 1999 when Bob was offered the chairmanship of the graduate program in public policy at Sac State. At that time, Waste left academia to dedicate herself full time to her art. Since then, her work has been featured in numerous magazines and art galleries, including Elliott Fouts Gallery in East Sac.

Art experts credit Waste with creating still lifes that possess a strong sense of narrative, but narrative isn’t her primary focus when creating a watercolor. “I think about color and shape and light and the best way to convey them,” she said. “People attach meanings to the objects I paint in ways that I can’t predict. The story unfolds differently for every viewer.” The predominance of food in her work developed naturally. “I cook. I grow vegetables. It’s all part of the fabric of who I am,” said Waste. “As a painter, you are expected to specialize, so I’ve chosen to specialize in food.”

When she isn’t painting food-related subjects for The Bee, Waste often paints objects she finds at yard and garage sales, commonplace consumer items that are connected in some way with her youth: soda bottles, vintage toasters, Mixmasters, marbles, autographed baseballs. Wonder Bread, an emblematic product of the 1950s and ’60s, whose brightly colored plastic wrapper is familiar to almost every American, is featured prominently in several of her works. “I like really simple objects that make a connection to the past,” explained Waste. “Our lives are very complicated these days.”

Waste doesn’t use her paintings to make ironic comments about American consumer culture, but merely to remind the beholder of simpler times. In a 2006 profile in American Art Collector, she told the magazine’s interviewer, “I want [the viewer] to think, ‘My grandmother had that iron. I grew up with that very same toaster. We had a coffee pot just like that.’”

Although her subjects are often simple and commonplace, capturing them on paper isn’t easy. Watercolor is one of the most unforgiving of artistic mediums. Unlike the artist who works in oil, the watercolorist can’t paint over a mistake. Waste says she has to know exactly how the finished painting will look before she can begin putting down the colors.

It’s a complicated process that used to begin with a pencil and a sketchbook but nowadays often begins with her iPhone. “If I’m at a grocery store or a farmers market and a display of fruits and vegetables catches my eye, I’ll take a quick reference photo with my phone,” she said. “It’s a great sketching tool.”

Many of Waste’s subjects come from her own backyard vegetable garden. She often paints those vegetables outdoors in the hour just after sunrise or just before sunset. “I like the way the light slants at those hours,” said Waste. “I think it says something about the passing of time. As I get older, I’m reminded more and more of how brief and fragile life is.”