Charles S. Klabunde

By 2002, Klabunde had moved from inner demons and internal fantasies toward a new affirmation of life. This was a natural consequence of his move away from nihilism and existentialism, toward spiritual transcendence. Now the bodies that he presents are ideally beautiful in the majestic series of very large pencil drawing poetically entitled Burned by the Fire of Our Dreams.

The New Overbrook Press edition of The Lost Ones was published on April 13, 1984, Beckett's 78th birthday. The next year Klabunde traveled to Paris and spent time with Beckett, who upon the book's publication, had sent his warm congratulations to the publisher and the artist for those terrifying images. Beckett signed all 250 copies of this limited edition book.

In 1982 Klabunde began making etchings for Beckett's The Lost Ones, the story of an other-worldly tribe trapped inside a cylinder. Working with Charles Altschul, publisher of New Overbrook Press, the artist's book contains seven hand-pulled intaglio prints placed loosely inside a handmade folio box with unbound pages of text.

In 1965 Klabunde moved to Edgewater, New Jersey, and working as a designer of interiors - classrooms and labs - for NYU. In 1967, he found an apartment in Greenwich Village and was able to open his first studio.

After high school, Klabunde studied drafting at the Omaha Technical School. When he completed the program, he went to work for his grandfather, an engineer, as a surveyor for a new housing development. Klabunde had no plans to attend college until a co-worker his own age persuaded him to enroll. Klabunde earned his B.F.A. in 1958 from the University of Nebraska and then attended graduate school at the University of Iowa, earning his M.F.A. in 1962. While at Iowa, he met the Argentine printmaker, Mauricio Lasansky, who encouraged him to build a career as an etcher.

Charles S. Klabunde (born October 1, 1935) is an American artist whose work has been characterized both as existential realism and as fantastical symbolism. He was born in Omaha, Nebraska.