Karl James Lubbering

Karl James Lubbering, known professionally as KLube, is a San Antonio-born visual artist and musician whose work draws upon an unusually rich mixture of family history, Texas culture, music, folk imagery, modernism and lived experience. Working frequently on a large scale and with exuberant color, geometry and expressive figures, Lubbering has developed a visual language he calls “San Antonio Modern Folk Art.”

The phrase is particularly appropriate because Lubbering’s relationship with San Antonio extends far beyond birthplace. His paintings emerge from a family rooted in Texas for generations and from a childhood immersed in both art and the distinctive cultural landscape of South and Central Texas.

His work can be whimsical, humorous and immediately accessible: cats, birds, cowboys, musicians, faces and fantastic figures populate his canvases. Yet beneath their apparent spontaneity is a sophisticated awareness of composition. Geometric shapes divide and reorganize pictorial space. Colors answer one another rhythmically. Figures can appear simultaneously primitive, modern and monumental.

Lubbering’s paintings resist easy classification because their sources resist it as well. Texas folk culture, contemporary art, music, childhood memory, modern design and the visual intensity of San Antonio all coexist within them.

That synthesis began with his family.