This is the first book in Larry Kaiser's Joseph's Easel series. It is an amusing, entertaining, enlightening and important vision of the mature artist, the "artist in full". Javi Attila Gran-Cognac, the troubled hero of Kaiser's novel, risks his life, his sanity, his loves, his legacy and his fortune down in the corpse-lined trenches on the long, bloody firing line of world politics. In Joseph's Easel, the Rise of an American Picasso, a precocious child learns that his drawings have the power to cause powerful villains in the adult world the kind of problems that make them want the young artist dead. Javi Attila Gran-Cognac, after surviving a botched assassination attempt, must then grow up an orphan. It is at the lowest point of his life when he realizes that no artist, regardless of his or her professional shimmer, can ever become an ARTIST IN FULL while ignoring, glossing over, dodging the politics, the manipulations, the guile, the circumspect-the gods and devils-which shape the world every artist paints. It is at that point that political paintings, and the leverage that powerful visual ridicule can exert for change, become his mission in life. But he is destined to learn that there are consequences for provoking powerful people. The gods and devils of this world have the ability and the will to paint with blood. Joseph's Easel is bold, it's beautiful, it's tragic, it's hilarious, it's provoking; it is political art in its own right.