The world is now her stage. For years, it’s been her palette.

by Ursula Gullow . photos by Matt Rose

Kathryn Temple hasn’t always been a professional actor. But in a way, she has been putting herself on display for years, creating introspective narrative oil paintings for more than a decade. The opportunity to act fell in her lap four years ago when she was asked to play a role in the NC Stage production of Live From WVL Radio Theatre: It’s A Wonderful Life. This month, Temple, 37, gets to show off both her painting and her acting skills. She will exhibit a collection of paintings in the lobby of downtown Asheville’s NC Stage Company in conjunction with Ruth, a play that opens July 1 and in which Temple stars as the leading lady.

The oil paintings she’ll show at NC Stage subtly allude to aspects of the play, a contemporary story written by local poet and teacher John Crutchfield and based loosely on the Biblical Book of Ruth. Crutchfield puts Ruth in a modern Western North Carolina setting and uses both traditional and experimental poetic devices throughout. A haunting painting Temple made of a tiny bird, for example, was inspired by the line from the play: “Tell me: do you remember when the nuthatch flew against our bedroom window pane?” Other paintings of floating book pages reflect the play’s nonlinear quality, as well as Temple’s affinity for words—and old Bibles. “The layout of text in a Bible is just about one of the most beautiful things to me,” she says.

Temple, a Chicago native who was raised in Atlanta, is known for incorporating palindromes into her paintings. Here’s one: “ode we own, woe we do.” Intrigued by the mirroring of the words, Temple, who learned to paint at age six, began concocting palindromes as a meditation during sleepless nights. “I have notebooks and notebooks of words and phrases I’ve come up with, “ she says. “I guess some people like to do crossword puzzles—I like to invent palindromes.”

She also creates portraits for patrons attracted to her classical realist painting style. To create a commissioned portrait, which can range in price from $50 to $5,000, Temple might film her subject and then use stills from the video as reference. She generally glazes layers of paint on top of one another—a technique she learned after studying the method of John Currin, a provocative American figurative painter.

So she can paint, act and write. Is there anything Temple can’t do? Sleeping, she says, is not something that comes easily, nor is keeping things neat and tidy. But she is often uncannily good at finding four-leaf clovers. Maybe they’ll bring her luck in her first starring role on the Asheville stage.

For more details about Kathryn and her work, check out www.kathryntemple.com. Ruth opens July 1 at NC Stage in Asheville. To buy tickets, go to www.ncstage.org.