[8] Bettina Heinen had three siblings, two brothers and a sister; the children grew up in a Solingen, Germany home characterized by art and openness.

[10][11] During World War II, Bettina Heinen lived with her mother and sister in Kreuzthal-Eisenbach near Isny in Allgäu from 1942, later joined by the painter and family friend Erwin Bowien (1899-1972), who had returned to Germany in 1942 after a ten-year stay in the Netherlands and was on constant flight from Nazi authorities.

[12] From 1948 to 1954, Bettina went to Solingen's August Dicke Girls' High School, where a teacher recognized and encouraged her talent.

Paintings by the then 18-year-old Bettina Heinen were included by the Frankfurt gallery owner Hanna Bekker vom Rath in the group exhibition Deutsche Kunst der Gegenwart (1955/56), in which they were shown alongside artworks by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Paul Klee, Max Beckmann, Max Ernst, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, and Käthe Kollwitz on a tour to South America, Africa, and Asia.

From 1958 Bettina studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Art in Copenhagen and made the first of several trips to Norway, where she bought a hut at the foot of the Seven Sisters.

In Paris, Bettina met her future husband, the Algerian Abdelhamid Ayech (1926-2010), at the Jardin du Luxembourg in 1960, when she was there painting with Bowien.

Two years after the birth of daughter Diana in 1961, the family moved to Guelma, Ayech's hometown in Algeria, which had since become independent from France.

[14] In the decades that followed, Bettina Heinen-Ayech switched between Solingen and Algeria, where she became a familiar sight in search of subjects in her car, "a vehicle that was once a R4," with "the inevitable cigarette holder in the corner of her mouth.

In 2012, she returned for the first time after the war to Kreuzthal in the Allgäu region of Germany, and was accompanied by a television crew from Bayerischer Rundfunk.

I paint this region in spring, while the green of the fields dotted with red - poppies - glows in all its tones, far from the dense green of Europe; in summer, when its blue and purple peaks rise above the wonderful gold of its wheat fields; in winter, when the red of the earth has an incredible power that is so difficult to represent!

"[20] In 1967, journalist Max Metzker wrote about Bettina Heinen-Ayech in the Düsseldorfer Nachrichten: "She is able to make a landscape accessible even to those who do not know it.

Since Bettina Heinen-Ayech's death, her son, the Munich doctor Haroun Ayech, has been working to honour her memory and that of her artist colleagues.