#tomasz gildebrant

[owlsandwich]

New practice drawing!

A fanart of Tomasz Gildebrant, the mysterious artist from @pb-dot's His Impossible Brushstrokes. If you like queer horror, definitely check out this WIP :D

[pb-dot]

Hmm... Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder, but according to this beholder it has to come down to these two.

Alicia Thorn from Thereafter. The logic behind this is twofold. One: she's an influencer, and while her main game is fitness, looking good on and off camera is a part of the job description. Two: It's one of those alluring character dualities that while Alicia unquestionably is very traditionally attractive woman, she feels imprisoned by it and wants to be free. She longs to be as strong as she can get, get a break from the relentless so-called self care routine, she wants to dress practically for whatever task and biome is at hand rather than what's proper or attractive. In short, she wishes she was back in the magical realm she visited as a child, where both dress and behavior codes were considerably more practical-minded, and she's had years of the frustration of not being back there. Now that she's again strong enough to chuck cars around, it'll be interesting to see how this frustration plays out. So in short, it's very central to her character conflicts that she's hot.

Tomasz Gildebrant from His Impossible Brushstrokes. The reason why Tomasz is hot is simpler, in that he's the love interest/hot boy with a dark secret in the piece. A hot love interest/antagonist helps, and you can't very well be a hot boy with a dark secret if you're not hot. There's a little bit more to it, mind, it's a contrast thing. His art is crude, bleak and unsettling, ostensibly upsetting enough to drive some folks mad, and the man himself is this charismatic, gregarious fellow who's hot as fuck. You're supposed to go "Oh shit would never have guessed" for a hot minute before you realize there is approximately 0% chance this boy doesn't have some skeletons, in his closet or elsewhere.

Who is your most beautiful oc, and why have you made them your most beautiful?

[pb-dot]

Sliding into yr asks to request an infodump about His Impossible Brushstrokes now that I know there's Rivals-to-Lovers and Horror. I heard that treat tin shake from 15 blocks away.

I am simplifying a bit when I say Rivals-to-Lovers, it is essentially One-sided admiration both ways -> Awkward politeness -> Something More? -> Wait a minute something's wrong here -> [SPOILER EXPUNGED] -> Night Of Terror -> Rallying -> Fight to the death pt. 1 -> Uneasy Alliance -> Genuine (?) Love? -> [SPOILER EXPUNGED] -> Fight to the death pt. 2 -> [SPOILER EXPUNGED]

I suppose everything between "something's wrong here" and the end can pretty much be collapsed into a Rivals To Lovers arc, although the precise emotions in play at any given time is... more implicit than explicit let's just say.

This is perhaps all getting ahead of myself. Let me start at the beginning:

Oscar Skerry is a San Francisco Art Critic with a singular artistic obsession. He loves the strange, bleak and jagged paintings of one Tomasz Gildebrant, a Polish-Dutch autodidact artist, at least he's assumed to be an autodidact, as nobody can find any documentation for his education. There's actually precious little known about Gildebrant, as he has not made a public appearance for decades, and the only a handful of photographs prove his existence.

Gildebrant's art isn't particularly popular, given how unpleasant many of his paintings are to watch in obscure but tangible ways, but a small community of fans, as well as the allure of his mystery, keeps getting his paintings sold. There might, however, be something more to it. Skerry follows a thread of brutal violence and odd obsession that seem to follow the Gildebrant paintings, and in stepping over a fair few ethical lines himself, he even secures an invitation from Gildebrant himself, to join him in his home in the Romanian mountains.

Once he finally meets the artist behind his obsession near the top of the Carpathian alps, Oscar can't quite get himself to believe that this refined, gregarious man produces art so bleak it is on occasion described as Depression Put On Canvas, but still, under the overwhelming almost-romantic friendliness, something else lurks. Try as he might, Oscar can't help but notice the cracks in the facade. Why are there so many different pairs and sizes of mountain boots at the entrance? What secret does the Gildebrant basement hold? Why does every door in the house lock automatically at midnight? Oscar simply must know, but what he will do, what he even could do, with the knowledge Gildebrant's house and mind contains, remains to be seen.

Oh shit, I almost forgot. The above isn't even the first time Oscar gotten himself into an antagonism-into-love situation. It's how he met his best frenemy, Mara. They met just after he moved from Minnesota where he grew up and went to University, and started hating each other in the most heteroerotic way possible just about right away. Oscar would belittle Mara, who in retaliation, or just because she felt like it, expose his parochial origins, mock his pretensions, or just throw shit at him. Things grew a bit messier, but much more interesting when Mara came to realize that Oscar had, and still has, a pronounced masochistic streak, and their relationship took a turn for the sexual. Hate-fucking turned into a more amicable sort of slap-and-tickle, and before they knew it, Mara and Oscar both had come to regard each others as whatever you call the overlap between friends, fuckbuddies, and rivals. Whatever you might call it, Mara and Oscar are still very close, and she provides much commentary on Oscar's ongoing descent into obsession in the earlier act of the book.

As for the status of this whole thing, the first draft is finished, but work on it is on a temporary hiatus as I do a final legibility pass on my previous work, The Clockwork Boy (which sadly contains no rivals-to-lovers at present,) but if you want to keep abreast of the developments when I start up working on HIB again, do feel free to check out my Tag List Post