Inigo has some rather exciting news: we’re on the move – moving into motion picture, that is. That’s right, our first film is here and with it a chance to step inside the beguiling world of artist Haidee Becker, who lives and paints in a Victorian house in Newington Green, north London, along with her dog, Lobos.
Haidee, now represented by Patrick Bourne & Co, was born in California in 1950 but shortly afterwards moved to Rome, where she lived with her parents – her father a writer, her mother an illustrator – until the family came to London when Haidee was 16. Those formative memories in the Eternal City remain with her, not least of all as a guiding source of inspiration for her painting: “I remember very clearly a very early memory in Rome,” she says, “With a beam of light coming through a crack in a shutter and the particles of dust floating in it. That’s almost the essence of what I try to go back to, capture again.” Today, that takes the form of still lifes, in which her everyday subject matter – everything from cut flowers and prawns to joints of meat and lettuce leaves – are observed with a palpable sense of closeness: “I sit and work in wonder at the object that I’m looking at, really just complete wonder,” she says.
