Brian Andreas (born 1956) is the pen name of Kai Andreas Skye, an American writer, artist, publisher and speaker widely known for his simple and poetic short stories of 50 to 100 words, often accompanied by distinctive color drawings. The stories range from wry comic commentary to elegant and direct meditations on themes of love, relationships, and being alive now.
His two dimensional work takes the form of pen and ink drawings, gouache watercolors with original hand-written texts, books incorporating both art and the writings, and colorful art prints. His three dimensional and mixed-media sculptural work as of 2021 often incorporates reclaimed wood in both lyrical & representational shapes, bright colors, drawing & handwritten text in graphite. His latest sculptural work references the palimpsests of antiquity with multiple sanded layers of gesso ground, paint & saturated ink layers & handwritten texts underneath the final artwork. The mixed-media sculptures incorporating salvaged wood in deliberately crude shapes, bright colors, hand drawings (especially faces) and rubber-stamped imprints of his writings went out of production at StoryPeople in June, 2015.
In 1994, Skye founded an Iowa company, StoryPeople, to distribute his work worldwide. In 2012 he founded tumblecloud.com, a collaborative digital storytelling platform. In 2014, he founded brianandreas.com as a platform for his original art and his other creative projects. In 2015, he was a key collaborator in the formation of A Hundred Ways North, a company focused on using stories and workshops to transform the ways people find and sustain community. In 2016, he signed an exclusive arrangement to distribute his new writing and artwork with Flying Edna. That continues to be the case today.
In 2016, Skye legally changed his name to Kai Andreas Skye.[4] He continues to use the pen name Brian Andreas in his older published work and his legal name, Kai Skye, in his work after June, 2020.
Per a 2019 divorce decree in Iowa, Skyes no longer holds any rights to his art and writing before September 2012, nor is he associated with StoryPeople, the company he founded and created. His earlier stories, prints and books to September 2012 continue to be released by StoryPeople. The work created after September 2012 is published for both national and international audiences by Flying Edna.
He currently lives in Massachusetts.
courtesy-wikipedia
- Brian Andreas