
Haidee Becker b. 1950
"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)