When you step into painter Haidee Becker's London home on a winter morning, you're immediately greeted by Lobos, her tall and dignified dog, before being handed a steaming mug of thick coffee. The 75-year-old artist then guides visitors to a window-lined breakfast nook where she serves bowls of muesli topped with grated apple and sesame seeds for calcium, followed by plates of scrambled eggs with toasted sourdough bread. Viennese cookies and what appears to be ginger cake wait temptingly on the counter, though guests often become so engrossed in conversations about life, death, family, and painting that they forget to try them until they're already on the bus home.
Becker was born in Hollywood in 1950 to artistic parents – her father was a gallerist and her mother an artist. Her family moved her to Rome when she was just two years old, then to London in 1969. Her parents collaborated on a book called "New Feathers for the Old Goose," which contains an illustrated poem titled "How to Make a Fish" that her chef son still recites today. Her mother was an eternal optimist who lived to 102 years old. "At her eulogy, I said that she was the only person I knew who could read a newspaper from beginning to end, then put it down and say, 'Isn't this a wonderful world?'" Becker recalls.
Standing in her kitchen shuffling eggs in a pan while wearing a cropped, darned sweater over soft overalls and a blue ribbon in her ponytail, Becker reflects on her artistic perspective. "My mother was the light side," she explains. "And I became her shadow, the dark side. I paint about death." Despite this seemingly somber focus, her subjects often include fish and flowers – transitory things that capture fleeting moments of beauty. "There are minutes or seconds in which they're so beautiful, I have to catch them. I love life, of course, but the shadow of death is always with me."
Becker taught herself to draw by copying pictures in the National Gallery, developing into a self-made artist. She had two children, Rachel and Jacob, the latter now being the chef-patron of Bocca de Lupo restaurant. At age 46, she moved in with writer Clive Sinclair and took various spaces as her painting studio over the years – ten different locations in ten years, including, for a while, a former brothel across from her son's restaurant in Soho. She would raid restaurant fridges for fish to paint and invite people off the street to sit for portraits, including actor Mark Rylance, whom she approached after admiring his unusual eyes as he passed her window.
On the first day of lockdown, while grieving Sinclair's recent death, Becker moved into her current Bauhaus-inspired home in northeast London with Lobos. She was attracted to the property primarily for its lateral space, stating, "I came here because I needed a studio, not a place to live." She immediately ripped out two bedrooms upstairs and transformed the entire first floor into a workspace, bookended by a small square bedroom and a plant-filled bathroom.
Her upstairs studio is a testament to her prolific output, with paintings stacked on shelves near the roof, on a special wooden mezzanine, and against multiple easels. The walls display portraits ranging from artist friends to a man she met at a homeless shelter. "People sit down and they talk. They know that they're opening their souls up," Becker explains. "And for me, it's a quest – it's almost the same when I'm painting flowers. It's reaching out and capturing that moment of being alive together. And the thing in the middle," she gestures theatrically with rolled-up sleeves, "is like a sieve where you catch bits of the other."
The studio features a table covered with shells, dried flowers, and objects she has painted, positioned beneath one of many windows. "I have a lot of light in the studio now, 11 sources, which is too many, it turns out, for someone who needs shadows," she notes. Above her bed hangs a single tiny portrait she painted of her daughter, while on her bedside table sits a painting of a sleeping child created by her mother – the two artworks seeming to be in conversation across generations.
Downstairs, the hallway serves as another workspace where Becker stretches canvases, wraps them for storage, and presses books into visitors' hands before they leave. A mammoth roll of bubble wrap hangs from the wall, and a folding room divider painted by her son when he was eight shields the staircase. "Isn't it magnificent," she says proudly of her son's childhood artwork.
The kitchen features the curved, comfortable breakfast nook and, by windows overlooking a narrow garden, her son's bonsai trees, which she's babysitting temporarily. The refrigerator is decorated with her daughter's linoleum prints, adding to the home's artistic atmosphere. A separate door opens onto a sitting room lined with books and dominated by her huge painting of delphiniums. On the desk, more books sit open beside a framed photograph of Sinclair. "This is where I study Yiddish, and try and face the problems of daily bills," she explains. Today's New York Times lies nearby, its contents inspiring what Becker describes as "impossible despair" – unlike her eternally optimistic mother.
Upon moving into the house, Becker built two new windows on either side of the fireplace, which houses a stove she had converted to be ecologically sound at considerable expense. To the left, a glass door leads to a tiny wooden house in the garden where she has Friday night sleepovers with her grandson. The pathway to this garden retreat is fairylike and artfully overgrown, adding to the home's magical quality.
"Making a home is like making a painting. It's a question of balance," Becker reflects while back in the kitchen. The space embodies this philosophy with its scented bouquet of geranium leaves and sprigs of rosemary on the table, small bronze sculptures reclining on window ledges, and children's drawings framed beside the sink. The light throughout is creamy and soft, accompanied by the smell of fresh bread and those ever-waiting cookies.
Despite the calm and textured beauty surrounding her, Becker dismisses the idea that someone might deliberately design a living space or be able to describe their aesthetic in concrete terms. "It's a constant. It's part of my blood, you know, part of my spit," she explains. While visitors might want to believe in Becker's self-described "dark side," in a house this bright and warm, filled with art, memories, and the evidence of a life fully lived, you really need to squint to see any darkness at all.
