There Will Come Soft Rains – Ray Bradbury

In the story a futuristic house goes about its daily routine; making breakfast, hoovering, ect. The people are long gone, so it is just this house functioning for no real reason. A fire starts in the house and it starts to burn down. In the text it mentioned a Picasso burning, at the time of painting this I was still writing my dissertation on Cubism. I thought to use Picasso’s study of Horta, which features buildings as the subject, which look like futuristic geometric structures.

There were a few problems with paining this, the first being copying the original painting while also imposing the alteration in colour that being next to a large fire would cause. Painting flames also proved to be quite tricky, they don’t look very effective. what to do beneath the line of flames was a bit of a conundrum, I kept it simple and made a subtle allusion to the frame of the canvas. I think the white marks to show the sweating and warping paint are quite effective, the smoke marks running upwards also look ok. I think the original painting does get a bit lost with half of it missing and other elements laid on top.