BY ASHE
™ & ©2024, ASHE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
CHIAROSCURO™ is a contemporary romantic drama between two strangers learning to redefine themselves through artistic collaboration…
A chance meeting brings together GIN, a former child prodigy who is burdened by artists block after abandoning her craft and NERO, a 400-year-old vampire and formerly famed baroque painter now hiding in obscurity. Through an unlikely collaboration, Nero helps Gin rediscover her passion for art and realize that its never too late to pursue a dream. In doing so, Nero learns to enjoy the creative process from behind the scenes rather than as the face of it, as the master becomes the muse.
GIN
Ginevra Collins (nicknamed “Gin”) is a former child prodigy with a gift for visual arts, now trapped in the unfulfilling monotony of a desk job. Unfulfilled and underpaid, she is haunted by the clutter of dusty canvases and half-filled sketchbooks she comes home to every evening: longing to create art again, but struggling to overcome artist’s block with no work-life balance.
…
Pushing papers was never how Gin imagined she’d spend her life. As a child, she was praised for her artistic gifts and fed the illusion that dreams come true. As an adult, she was hit with the cold reality that talent alone doesn’t get dreams off the ground.
Coming home from her 9-5 (which was only meant to be a temp job), Gin laments the single notification on her phone of a like given to a piece of art she posted five years ago. Hoping to ignite her creative spark once again, Gin attends a private showing of the collected works of reclusive art curator A.B. Ollivier. Little does she know that he is secretly the artist behind all of them.
NERO
Nero is a centuries-old vampire and once-famed master of baroque painting. Though passionate about creating, he only enjoys a brief artistic career once a century, reinventing his identity as needed to keep under the radar of prying human eyes. Having enjoyed a lavish stint as an avant-garde pop artist until faking his death at the turn of the millennium, Nero now lives incognito as the heir of his former persona’s estate.
…
Born to poor Jewish parents in 17th century Italy, Nero’s talent for the arts was limited by his social status. Though officially barred from entering the Academy in Florence, he was permitted to audit under the condition that he serve as a ghost painter for more prominent artists burdened with other commissions. Nero mastered his craft and won favor of wealthy private commissioners–one in particular who believed Nero’s potential to be worthy of immortality.
As a vampire, Nero dabbled in different art movements across the span of centuries. His greatest success, however, was achieved in the late 20th century under the pseudonym NIR.
As NIR, Nero channeled his post-war rage and sorrow into the form of provacative avant-garde paintings and rose to commercial fame and fortune. Though he enjoyed the lavish lifestyle, the rapid accessibility of Internet posed a threat to Nero’s identity. To preserve his secret, he faked NIR’s death in a New Year’s Eve car crash at the turn of the millennium.
Cautious of returning to the public eye (after all, the Internet is forever), Nero currently lives a private life under the pseudonym of A.B. Olivier, a hermetic art collector and heir to the fortune of one of his past aliases. Longing for the spotlight again, Nero hosts private viewings of A.B. Olivier’s curated archive which, unbeknownst to his guests, are all his own work.
JAMES
James Glimmer was once a groundbreaking visual artist and a former friend, colleague, muse and lover of Nero, until his life was tragically cut short in the peak of his career. Mute and invisible to all but the undead, James now haunts his former companion’s estate as a ghost to mitigate the boredom of pushing daisies when he wasn’t yet finished pushing artistic boundaries.
…
Born “James Grimmer”, to a staunchly conservative small town American family in the 1950s, James abandoned his past and reinvented himself as the groundbreaking visual artist “James Glimmer”, detesting his old name which was “too maudlin and German” for his taste.
Though his early years as a gay teen growing up in mid-century America were marred by pain and abuse, James found himself at home in the art world and quickly rose to the top of his field pouring all of the pieces of himself that were once silenced into avant-garde homoerotic art. Through networking, he crossed paths with Nero and began a relationship as contemporaries which rapidly evolved into more.
James’ explosive success came crashing down prematurely, after he contracted HIV from Nero who was irresponsibly feeding off of his lover as well as multiple strangers at the time in a hedonistic bender. As his disease progressed and became publicized James was demonized by the 1980s-era media’s moral panic, though he honorably braved the attacks against his character out of a commitment towards keeping his friend’s darkest secret. Losing the energy to create and shunned by galleries who wanted nothing to do with him, James’ name became seemingly forgotten along with many unfinished projects which his estranged family threw away upon his death.
Though they reconciled upon James’ death bed, Nero hesitated to gift James with immortality and missed his chance to save his companion’s life.
James now haunts Nero as a ghost, mostly because he enjoys being able to talk to someone who can actually answer.
“Art is not what you see,
but what you make others see.”
EDGAR DEGAS
LICENSING
CHIAROSCURO™ is a developing project formatted as an upcoming light novel series, with a debut volume scheduled for a 2026 release (TBA). For inquiries about distribution, publishing or for animation pitch deck, contact me via e-mail.