A bit about artist and storyteller Brian Andreas:
Q. Your art & stories are all over the world - in the US & Canada, Europe, the Pacific Rim. Now, with the web, you have people from every place in between who know about what you do, too. Has that changed your work?
A. Yes & no. The stories still lead me around at their own pace & if I'm lucky, I understand them soon enough to make sense of what they're trying to tell me. With an audience that large, though, I can send the stories out there for other people to figure out, too, to see if they make sense in their lives. This is a hard point for me to explain, but I feel that the stories are catalysts & they help give a new form to our unspoken thoughts & feelings. When I hear from people about their favorites, I get a sense of how the world is expanding & evolving, in a way I'd never get from the media, or from my own limited travels. I see the strands that connect us, the ways we're more alike than we're different, the dreams we all have for the future of our children & our neighbors. The stories remind me that wherever we are, we live in the heart of the world. If anything has changed, having the stories travel so widely has made the world a more intimate place for me, which only leads to more stories...
Q. What's it like to be back in California?
A. I think the best way to answer this is with a story: when I was growing up in Chicago, we went to a church that had missionaries who'd come back once a year from Fiji & give talks. I remember one of them saying it was very hard work telling people they were going to lose their everlasting souls if they didn't shape up. I pictured people sitting on the beach listening to this sweaty man all dressed in black telling them they were going to burn in hell & them thinking this was good fun, these scary stories this guy was telling them & afterwards, they'd all go home & eat mango & fish & they'd play Monopoly & laugh & laugh & they'd go to bed & wake up the next day & do it all again.
I feel like one of the people on the beach who actually believed the guy in black for awhile, but now I've had mango & fish & I'm back to feeling the sun on my face & the warm wind on my skin & tonight I'm going to go to sleep & tomorrow I'm going to wake up & do it all again. It feels like I'm home...
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