Windsor Joe Innis - biography - W. Joe Innis - art

Also Rising
(2nd Edition)
ISBN: 978-0595152001
Authors Guild/iuniverse

“Full of humor and insight, Innis' story brings together some of the best aspects of contemporary American fiction in its exploration of what it means to find art in life, and life in art”
— ALA Booklist

"Also Rising is a wonderful and powerful novel that has remained present with me long after reading it. Innis is a gifted and engaging storyteller: as wry and amusing as Twain, and as forceful as Hemingway. The fabric of this novel is woven from fibers of Innis's own life as an often expatriate novelist and painter. Yet for all its humor and great writing, this is a novel about ideas. Also Rising's powerful central metaphor --the artist as bullfighter-- is a compelling one. The bullfight propels Innis's exploration of fear and courage, of the importance of art in life, and of what it means to live as an artist.

Isaac, the novel's protagonist, is a painter who has found a job teaching sculpture at an American art colony in San Miguel de Allende in central Mexico. He is passionate about art's tradition and its ability to transcend the present and communicate higher values. Heinrich is a New York postmodernist who denies the importance of art and tradition by painting stripes over impressionist masterpieces and thereby successfully "brands" himself as an artworld superstar.

The contest between Isaac and Heinrich, between tradition and anti-tradition, is played out through a bullfight. Isaac defends the art and tradition of bullfighting, which he has seen and admired, while Heinrich denies its value as an art. A wily old Picasso-like ganadero, or bull owner, who overhears their arguments, maneuvers the two into participating in an actual bullfight which he presides over. The stakes are high: a woman, love, their stature as artists, their own self-image, perhaps even their careers. Surprisingly few novels choose Picasso as a central figure but here he's especially appropriate. Picasso, who likely introduced Hemingway to bullfighting, was himself an artist steeped in the traditions of painting and bullfighting and often thought of his own artistic career, his struggles and battles with the long tradition of art, as a bullfight, which he also often depicted. The tradition of bullfighting, like the tradition of painting, is likely as old as humanity itself. Even Paleolithic paintings of bulls that survive from 30,000 years ago are so accomplished as to imply a long tradition of painting and very likely even bullfighting behind them: When Picasso saw the cave paintings at Lascaux he said, "We have invented nothing."

Innis is concerned with the devaluing and displaced importance of art in the contemporary world. The past is alive for him and because it is he makes the highest demands for art. He views making art as a struggle, a fight that engages tradition and the past, and that as Innis sees it is perhaps the central fight for civilization."
- John W. Clark from: amazon.com

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ISBN: 9780595144556
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"One of the best 'How-To' books I've come across in awhile. Honest, straight- forward and witty . . . a refreshing breath of air in a world stifled by artspeak."
— Art Times