Rachel Heller, artist whose work was collected by David Hockney and Maggi Hambling – obituary

Rachel Heller, who has died a day before her 50th birthday, was an artist whose drawings, etchings and paintings were compared with Braque and Picasso and whose admirers included David Hockney, Maggi Hambling, Sir Peter Blake and Sir Anthony Caro; what made her breakthrough into the London art world all the more remarkable was that she had Down’s syndrome.

Rachel Heller lacked confidence in speaking (despite a deep understanding of what was going on around her), but the genetic condition she was born with never stood in the way of her ability to express herself through pictures. This first revealed itself in primary-school notebooks crowded with drawings of matchstick figures playing football or dancing.

When Rachel was 13, her mother, Angela Flowers, brought two of these sketches into the gallery she had founded in 1970 to champion up-and-coming artists. One of them became the subject of a bidding war between the artist John Bird and the TV executive (Sir) Jeremy Isaacs, who succeeded in buying the picture. Angela Flowers realised that it was time to start taking her daughter’s art seriously.

Rachel Heller’s subjects went on to include landscapes as well as figures – solid, with smudged, enigmatic expressions. 

Reclining women were a favourite, and one of these, Lady Sleeping in Bed, won the Hugh Casson Drawing Prize at the 2006 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. It is an uninhibited depiction in charcoal and pastel of a half-dressed person, all thick black lines and vivid greens, blues and reds, with nipples like glacé cherries.

This direct and sensual approach to the human body was one of the qualities that attracted other artists to Rachel Heller’s work. Although she worked hard to develop her talent, her artistic vision had at the same time a naturalness to it that was uncluttered by academic theory. As Edward Lucie-Smith put it in his catalogue introduction to her 1997 solo show, she had got rid of  the tiresome “artistic super-ego”, so “her drawings [were] entirely about what she sees… with a purity of intention which very few artists manage to maintain.”

He detected a resemblance in her abstract work to the paintings of Roger Hilton, and in her drawings to the figures drawn by Braque and Picasso “before their definitive plunge into Cubism”.

It undoubtedly helped Rachel Heller’s career that she had highly supportive parents and was able to showcase her work at the Angela Flowers galleries, Flowers Central in Cork Street and Flowers East. But that advantage did not explain her success at the RA Summer Exhibition, where her anonymously submitted drawings were selected by the judging panel in six years.

She was born in London on September 15 1973, the daughter of Angela Flowers and her partner and later second husband, the management consultant and author Robert Heller. Her mother, who was 40, already had four children with her first husband, the photographer Adrian Flowers.

Down’s syndrome, caused by the presence of an extra chromosome, was diagnosed, at a time when children with the condition were often confined to institutions, denied education and stared at in public. Angela Flowers recalled the harsh reaction of some hospital staff. A nurse told her with brutal insensitivity: “You’ll have to make your decision now” – meaning whether or not to keep her. A social worker visited at home and said, meaning to provide comfort: “They don’t live long, you know.”

But the diagnosis was a shock, especially for Rachel’s father Bob, who remembered feeling “horror”, and sitting in the car and “howling”. By the next day, however, when he looked at Rachel, he just saw a lovely-looking baby and thought: “What’s all this fuss about?”  

They made sure that from the age of four, Rachel was in good schools, among them the Gatehouse Learning Centre in Bethnal Green, which integrated children with disabilities into mainstream classes, and Holly Court special needs primary school in Highgate. 

Her passion for creating pictures was sparked and she began an apprenticeship that lasted well into adulthood, taking a special needs art course at Hammersmith and West London College and an art A-level, a foundation course at the Byam Shaw School of Art, gaining a diploma in 2001, summer schools at the Slade in 2001 and 2003, and two years at the Prince’s (now Royal) Drawing School from 2005. 

Sundays she would spend sketching, with a companion, at the Victoria and Albert Museum or the National Gallery, often working from religious pictures. She also sculpted in clay and made painted ceramics.

Her first solo exhibition, when she was 20, was a sell-out at the John Jones Art Centre. She quickly attracted collectors in the arts world, among them the poet Sue Hubbard, the actor Russell Tovey, the biographer Victoria Glendinning and many artists, including John Kirby, Jeffery Camp, Jock McFadyen, Nicola Hicks and Neil Jeffries.

Her friend Matthew Cheesman, professor of creative writing at Derby University, described the struggle she went through to achieve what she did as an artist, arguing that she was not simply “gifted” with her ability (contrary to a common myth about “outsider artists” with visionary insights): “It didn’t come ‘naturally’ to her: rather she laboured at it… through persistence and determination… What her work does with colour and form is direct and audacious, encompassing a range of moods, from a brooding anxiety to a joyous celebration of delight.”

Her long and successful career also demonstrated what was possible with full access to education, and in this her family’s “can-do” rather than “can’t do” approach was instrumental. For her father Bob, Rachel Heller was not “handicapped” but rather “amiable and slightly eccentric”, while Angela Flowers saw her daughter’s career as an opportunity for society to recognise what a Down’s syndrome person was capable of doing.

Rachel Heller had a very special relationship with the Scottish artist Peter Howson, who has Asperger’s. They would write to each other – sending a picture on a card as the main way of communicating.

Apart from art, she had an encyclopedic knowledge of pop music and wrote out a new playlist every day to work through. Her favourite era was the 1980s and her favourite saying was “keep dancing”. She collected autographs (Madonna, Tony Bennett and others), kept a packet of Silk Cut in her denim-jacket pocket (shocking her anti-smoking mother), and did her hair with a shock of pink or electric blue; for a time it was styled by Keith Wainwright, the co-founder of the Smile salon.

Bob Heller developed Parkinson’s disease and died in 2012; Angela Flowers died in August this year. Rachel Heller’s four half-siblings, Adam, Matthew, Daniel and Francesca, survive her.

Rachel Heller, born September 15 1973, died September 14 2023