Resides: Chicago, IL

"Heather Becker is and always has been a figure painter who works from memory and imagination, almost never from models, yet who creates figures of such emotional resonance that they suggest stories, places, whole lives.

Maybe for this reason because the work is psychologically rather than perceptually inspired - Becker's subjects have remained remarkably consistent over the years. They are gaunt, worried, haunted, a collection of waifs and wanderers, romantic sufferers who are set solo in hazy compositions of uncertain location.

Where exactly these figures come from is uncertain. They're not self-portraits - Becker thinks of her work as "an assimilation of self and other" - though when she works from her own image it tends to resemble her invented figures. She doesn't even think of the figures as the same character. She sees her subjects as distinct personalitites, each with a separate history and a specific culture of origin.

Exactly which cluture is not the point. The figures tend to wear robes and headscarves, skullcaps and turbans. They might live in a desert or in the mountains - their headgear suggests Tibet or Morocco - but the misty backgrounds divulge nothing. Here's the thing though - Becker studies her paintings for clues as much as the viewer does, as if these figures have arrived in her life and presented themselves for painting, not at all as if she has made them herself. She thinks the pensive woman in Under the Lotus Tree might be West African. Considering White Desert, an image of a graceful male figure wrapped in a voluminous white robe and surrounded by a bright haze that could be snow or a sandstorm, Becker speculates that perhaps heat has rendered this solitary figure delirious and caused him to dream of snow.

While the emotion in the earlier work seemed inspired by High Baroque, the newer figures are more ascetic and cerebral, more subtle and complicated, suggesting a contradiction not present in the earlier work. If that was frankly and turbulently voluptuous, these newer paintings hint at an intriguing tug-of-war between asceticism and sensuality.

becker attributes this new tranquility in her work - one of the quitest new paintings is simply titled Calm - to factors in her own life, notably her deep immersion in yoga and meditation. The physical and spiritual balance those disciplines confer may have calmed the paintings. Given the independent lives that Becker's subjects seem to lead, though, it also seems possible that they only allowed their creator peace of mind when they found theirs."

--Margaret Hawkins, 2008