Brian Andreas - StoryPeople

StoryPeople

With his wife's words and two young sons as motivation, Andreas went out into his backyard and pulled a board from the fence and began to play with the boards and place little stories and some color onto them. Soon, shaped as 'people,' they began to sell at local craft markets in the San Francisco Bay area. Encouraged by the results, Andreas and his wife, Ellen Rockne, along with their sons, subsequently left Berkeley early in 1994 and returned to Decorah, Iowa, where the two had previously attended Luther College. Of the results of the Hall of Whispers and the fence-board experiments, it was eventually written that "he discovered the StoryPeople waiting to be carved out of rough barn board, painted in bright colors, and hand-lettered with their individual stories." He "gives voice to the vision of the child and the unsophisticated in books that listen to unnamed 'StoryPeople,' who express themselves through hand-stamped print, as if epigrammatically."

Andreas established the StoryPeople headquarters in downtown Decorah, Iowa, in May 1994 and spent the next decade directing the production of wood sculptures, print reproductions, books, greeting card sets and furniture all bearing his trademark "bright colors . . . and hand-lettered stories." He and his family have since moved back to California where they have recently moved into their new eco-friendly "green" home. Andreas continues to innovate with new stories and new media, currently creating original works on large canvases while also overseeing the development of a new website.

Of his work, Andreas says, "I like art that admits to being a part of life. The moments I have with my friends and family are really all that I need. I like to take them and weave them into stories that are filled with laughter and music and lunacy. And they are mostly true, but I'm not telling which parts. . . " "I have a real quirky view of the world. A century ago I would have been standing on a soapbox in Hyde Park telling people about a better way of seeing."

Andreas' first book of hand-stamped stories and black-and-white line drawings, entitled Mostly True, was first published in August, 1993. Still Mostly True followed in May 1994, and to date Andreas' publications include a total of ten books. He was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for Traveling Light in 2003, and again for Some Kind of Ride in 2006.