"My first startling encounter with Haidee Becker's painting is refreshing with each new exhibition. Friends of hers and mine had left with her their two children for a few days. When I saw the portraits of the two, painted during those days, the shock of their live presence, in such marvellously fluid and moulded colours, was something I shall never forget. Those pictures became, for me, an ideal of portraiture. The painted surface like some kind of precious substance - nothing fixed or cold, yet nothing arbitrary or external - and a vibrant immediacy of the person.

After that, I got to know some of her still lives and flowers. They have, for me, the essential quality; the revelation of a passionate inwardness, like portraits of hypnagogic images just about to materialise, lit and shadowed with a turbulent yet magnetic inner form. The depth is the psychological depth of great sweetness - gently and powerfully focused. Living with them has confirmed all my first impressions about them."

TED HUGHES (1930-1998)