featherynscale | LJ-Balderdash: Art Appreciation

The answers are in -- please vote by commenting with your choice. There is a correct answer hidden among the BS answers in this round, and choosing it earns you one point. Please vote before Monday at 9 a.m. to be counted.

I think this is the best group of answers yet -- well done, y'all.

(NOTE: A couple of these are edited slightly from the original submission. Some people responded as if they were speaking directly to me, so I pulled out the personal notes.)

1. With brilliant bold stokes of molten glass David Mann transformed the giant black obelisk he found in his new house. "I was clearing out the shred from the previous owner and there it was behind a bunch of dead hydrangeas. I was going to throw it away but the damn thing wouldn't move. I eventually tore down the shed trying to move it but no luck and now all the neighbors could see it. So, after taking a correspondence course I painted it so it wouldn't look so bad. I would have painted the whole thing but working with molten glass is a bitch. The only problem now is all the damn squirrels in the backyard. Would you believe I even saw one of them using some crude nutcracker?" Mann calls his piece "Stereotypes in Homogeneity". When asked why he said "What are those fucking squirrels up to now?"

2. "Sycamore at Sunset", by John Henry Twachtman

3. This is Otis Smithfield's painting entitled Cobblestones. He painted it after a night on Thunderbud (two bottles warm, and one cold), when he came to on one of the older streets in his town.

4. Blueman, by Fiongula ap Mywennyd
A profile of the Atlantian version of the Greenman of air-sucker fame.

5. Mr. Buzzy, by Georgia O'Keefe. This visual is a close-up from an unattributed still-life painting of O'Keefe's second-favorite vibrator. (The painting of her favorite vibrator is part of a private collection, and regrettably unavailable for viewing.)

6. The painting is "Vertical Horizon" by Colin Harbut. Harbut says about his work: "My latest paintings are an exploration into the boundaries between abstraction and figuration. While I admire the intuitive process of abstract painting, I investigate the communicative possibilities of the oil medium through color, form, and texture. In this approach I search for unique, non-cliché method to discuss the human condition from a completely innovative, non-representational perspective."

7. "Prismatic Wall" by Earnest Rowe. Rowe was incarcerated at the Union Correctional Institution in Raiford, FL and currently waits on Death Row due to his multiple homicide convictions. This particular piece is entitled Prismatic Wall, after the 8th level Wizard spell of the same name found in the Player's Handbook on page 264. It seems that it was a Prismatic Wall that so weakened Mr. Rowe's 17th level Paladin that it was finally killed off by a jab from an orc's spear. The loss of such a high level character to such a minor threat caused an enraged Mr. Rowe to mercilessly slaughter his entire gaming group, including his stepson Jeffery, and no less than a dozen magic players in the next room.

8. Title: Arctic Black On Your Side
Artist: Andy Warhol
It is a little known fact that Andy Warhol was the initiator in a very popular children's art form. This piece comes from his children's collection and was a follow up to "Arctic Black On Your Back" which was a white canvas painted black which he then took a screwdriver to and poked holes in to simulate the stars. The media for "Arctic Black On Your Side" is a white 11x14 piece of paper which he colored with marker and then covered in black crayon. To get the right effect, he then scrapped off the black crayon to reveal the colored portions.

9. This is from Ghogan's The Little Mermaid on Crack collection. It depicts the age-old struggle between darkness and light, wherein the viewer finds herself drawn, invariably, towards the blurry lines in the middle.

10. Ace of Wands (unused variant background) - Lady Frieda Harris.

11. This is the edge of the Chagall window of Herschel, the infamous "Thirteenth Son of Jacob the Patriarch." The window was a gift to the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, from the Beth Hamedrosh Hagadol Kesser Maariv Anshe Luknik synagogue in Skokie.

12. The artist is none other than Gustav Klimt and the painting is none other than The Veil at the Edge of Forever. This work was completed shortly before his death in 1918 and was originally thought to have been destroyed in a mysterious Vienna wharehouse fire in 1921. The Veil at the Edge of Forever was inspired by a rather disturbing dream Klimt had had. In the course of this dream it was revealed that World War One was nothing but a magickal act of mass human sacrifice designed to fling open wide the barriers of the Great Watchtower of the East that has kept hostile Enochian Angels from entering our world. Klimt became obsessed with discovering the order behind such a hideous act, but whatever secrets he managed to uncover he took with him to the grave.

13. "Life Emerging from Chaos", by Ivan Vrubel, 1923.
Ivan Vrubel sadly never achieved the fame of either of his parents, the painter Mikhail Vrubel, and the opera singer Nadezhda Zabela, and later in life went insane like his father and eventually committed suicide in 1946.