{"id":291427,"date":"2025-11-30T13:12:16","date_gmt":"2025-11-30T13:12:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/291427\/"},"modified":"2025-11-30T13:12:16","modified_gmt":"2025-11-30T13:12:16","slug":"art-is-the-heart-of-painter-haidee-beckers-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/291427\/","title":{"rendered":"Art is the heart of painter Haidee Becker\u2019s home"},"content":{"rendered":"

homes<\/p>\n

Sunday, 30 November 2025<\/p>\n

Memories and paintings jostle for space in the light-filled London house of this prolific artist\"Photographs<\/p>\n

Photographs by Lily Bertrand Webb<\/p>\n

\"Photo<\/p>\n

Eva Wiseman<\/p>\n

When you walk into Haidee Becker\u2019s London house on a wintery morning you will be greeted by Lobos, a\u00a0tall dignified dog, be handed a mug of thick coffee and then guided towards a\u00a0window-lined breakfast nook to eat a bowl of muesli with grated apple and sesame seeds (\u201cfor calcium\u201d) and then a plate of scrambled eggs with toasted sourdough. You will intend to have two or three of the Viennese biscuits that wait on the counter, along with a slice of what looks like ginger cake, but you will forget because by then you will be so invested in the life, home and work of this 75-year-old artist, so engaged in conversation about death, family, painting, and also, quite full, that you\u2019ll only remember them\u00a0on the bus home.<\/p>\n

Becker was born in Hollywood in 1950 to a gallerist father and an artist mother, who\u00a0moved her to Rome at the age of two, then London in 1969. A book her parents made together, New Feathers for the Old Goose, contains an illustrated poem called \u201cHow to Make a Fish\u201d that her chef son still repeats. Her mother was an eternal optimist. \u201cAt her eulogy,\u201d after she died aged 102, \u201cI said that she was the only person I knew who could read a newspaper from beginning to end, then put it down and say, \u2018Isn\u2019t this a\u00a0wonderful world?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Becker is shuffling eggs in a pan \u2013 she\u2019s wearing a cropped, darned jumper over soft dungarees, and a blue ribbon in her ponytail. \u201cMy mother was the light side,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd I became her shadow, the dark side. I paint about\u00a0death.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Blooms<\/p>\n

Blooms with a view: in\u00a0the garden with Lobos<\/p>\n

Becker became an artist by teaching herself to draw, copying pictures in the National Gallery. Her subjects are often fish, or flowers, \u201cthings that are transitory. There are minutes or seconds in which they\u2019re so beautiful, I have to catch them. I love life, of course, but the shadow of death is always with me.\u201d<\/p>\n

She had two children, Rachel and Jacob (now the chef-patron of Bocca de Lupo) and, at 46, moved in with the writer Clive Sinclair. She took various spaces as her painting studio, 10 over 10\u00a0years, including, for a while, a brothel opposite her son\u2019s restaurant in Soho. She\u2019d raid their fridges for fish to paint, and invite people off the street to sit for her, including (after admiring his unusual eyes as he passed her window) the actor Mark Rylance.<\/p>\n

On the first day of lockdown, grieving Sinclair\u2019s recent death, Becker moved into this Bauhaus-inspired home in northeast London with Lobos, attracted by the lateral space. \u201cI came here because I\u00a0needed a studio, not a place to live.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Shelf<\/p>\n

Shelf life: books line many of the walls<\/p>\n

She ripped out two bedrooms upstairs and turned the first floor into a\u00a0workspace, bookended by a small square bedroom and plant-strung bathroom. Paintings are stacked on shelves up near the roof, and on a special wooden mezzanine, and against easels. On the wall is a portrait\u00a0of an artist friend, down there a portrait of a man she met at a homeless shelter. \u201cPeople sit down and they talk. They know that they\u2019re opening their souls up. And for me, it\u2019s a quest \u2013 it\u2019s almost the same when I\u2019m painting flowers. It\u2019s reaching out and capturing that moment of being alive together. And the thing in the middle,\u201d she gestures theatrically with her sleeves rolled up, \u201cis like a sieve where you catch bits of the other.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here is a table strewn with shells and dried flowers and objects once painted, underneath one of many windows. \u201cI\u00a0have a lot of light in the studio now, 11\u00a0sources,\u201d which is too many, it turns out, for someone who needs shadows.<\/p>\n

On the wall above her bed is a single tiny portrait by Becker of her daughter, and on the bedside table a painting of a sleeping child by her mother. The two seem to be in conversation. Is Becker working on anything at the moment? \u201cI\u2019m working on everything,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

\"Small<\/p>\n

Small joys: one of Haidee Becker\u2019s flower paintings with a plate of shells<\/p>\n

Downstairs, the hallway is a workspace, hung with a mammoth roll of bubble wrap, where Becker presents you with the coffee and stretches canvases and wraps them for storage and presses books into your hand before you leave. A\u00a0folding room divider painted by her son when he was eight shields the staircase. \u201cIsn\u2019t it magnificent,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

One door leads to the kitchen, with its curved, comfortable nook and, by windows on to a narrow garden, her son\u2019s bonsai trees, which she\u2019s babysitting for a while. The fridge is panelled with her daughter\u2019s lino prints. The other door opens on to a sitting room lined with books, and her huge painting of delphiniums. On the desk more books sit open\u00a0beside a\u00a0framed photograph of Sinclair. \u201cThis is where I study Yiddish, and try and face the problems of daily bills.\u201d Elsewhere, today\u2019s New York Times, the contents of which inspire in Becker, unlike her mother, impossible despair.<\/p>\n

Upon moving into the house, she built two new windows on either side of the fireplace, in which sits a stove that she had made ecologically sound, at great expense, and to their left a glass door leads to a tiny wooden house in the garden, where she has sleepovers with her grandson on Friday\u00a0nights. The pathway is fairylike and artfully\u00a0overgrown.<\/p>\n

\"Let<\/p>\n

Let the light in: new windows in the sitting room on either side of the fire place<\/p>\n

Making a home, she says, back in the kitchen, \u201cis like making a painting. It\u2019s a question of balance.\u201d On the table is a scented bouquet of geranium leaves and spindles of rosemary \u2013 small bronze sculptures recline on window ledges and children\u2019s drawings are framed beside the sink. The light here is creamy and soft, the smell of bread, the waiting biscuits. Amid all this calm and textured beauty she\u2019s dismissive of the idea that a person might stand back and design a\u00a0space to live\u00a0in, that they might be able to describe\u00a0their\u00a0aesthetic.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a constant. It\u2019s part of my blood, you know, part of my spit.\u201d You want to\u00a0believe in Becker\u2019s dark side, but in a\u00a0house this bright and warm, you really need to squint.<\/p>\n

For information, go to haideebecker.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"homes Sunday, 30 November 2025 Memories and paintings jostle for space in the light-filled London house of this…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":291428,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[1897,6225,6485,6486,1120,96,32649,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-291427","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-art","9":"tag-arts","10":"tag-arts-and-design","11":"tag-artsanddesign","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-interiors","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom","17":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291427","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=291427"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291427\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/291428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=291427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=291427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=291427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}