Her previously-unseen paintings are being published in a new book about her oeuvre, revealing a different side to the unique, courageous artist
“I’ve made three pieces of seminal art in my life,” Tracey Emin once said. “If I died tomorrow, I’d be remembered for making them.” Those works, of course, include her 1995 installation, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With, and 1998’s My Bed – two intimate pieces which have achieved iconic status.
Rewind the clock 10 years, and Emin’s work looks starkly different. Before she was meticulously littering her travelling bed with used condoms, cigarette butts, and empty vodka bottles, the artist was sweeping paint onto woodcuts and signing her name ‘Traci’.
These early works – many of which Emin believes have been destroyed by an ex boyfriend – reveal her roots as a painter. In one, the artist depicts Christ on the cross, his yellow figure almost blending into the scene behind him; another sees vivid blocks of colour transform into two women; while in one, scratchy black lines and newspaper print depict an Istanbul cityscape.
These previously-unseen paintings, dating back to the 80s, appear for the first time in a new visual book about the artist’s oeuvre. Titled Tracey Emin, the book has been put together by art critic Jonathan Jones, who came across the early works last year while exploring Emin’s studio archive.
“I was really charmed and touched when I saw the woodcuts and watercolours she did as a student in the 1980s,” Jones tells Dazed. “They have an intensity and almost religious fervour.”
“She turns her life, including her relationship with Billy Childish, into a dark vision inspired by German expressionism,” he continues. “She found out about expressionism when she was about 15, after finding out that David Bowie’s pose on the cover of his album Heroes is based on the art of Egon Schiele. Her early work shows just how deeply and sincerely she embraced this soulful aesthetic.”
Speaking about her early works in a 2009 Guardian article, Emin said it took her “years to understand the magic of drawing”, explaining that she spent almost a decade just learning how to do it. “My emotions force the drawing out of my hand,” she explains. “Every image has first entered my mind, travelled through my heart, my blood – arriving at the end of my hand. Everything has come through me.”
“I was really charmed and touched when I saw the woodcuts and watercolours she did as a student in the 1980s. They have an intensity and almost religious fervour” – Jonathan Jones
This kind of declaration, as well as her conceptual pieces, sometimes led people to overanalyse the meaning behind her work. Recalling a time in which she was drawing birds during her Young British Artist years, Emin says people thought she was making some ironic point. “But I wasn’t,” she asserts. “I was just drawing birds.”
Writing in the Guardian, Jones says the early paintings show Emin as a “sincere and skilled artist” whose “passion for drawing and painting… meant she could never become a purely conceptual artist”, despite her most renowned works being emblematic of this movement.
In recent years, Emin has returned to painting, displaying her dripping pink and red silhouettes at the White Cube last year, and launching a digital exhibition of self-portraits and still life drawings in June. As Jones observes: “Where she is now is where she started out, in front of a blank sheet or canvas.”
Speaking to Dazed, he adds: “Over the last few years, she has dedicated herself to painting. It’s a brave choice given that the art world has other priorities, and she could just be selling embroidered blankets by the dozen. It’s part of her boldness that she chooses to go another way.”
Explaining what draws him to Emin’s work, Jones says: “I am bowled over by Tracey Emin’s honesty and courage. It comes through in everything she does. The way she shares her life is unique – she’s not a ‘performance artist’, but someone who scrutinises herself profoundly.”
“In a way,” he continues, “it’s easier to compare her with writers than other artists. She’s also a romantic who believes in art as a kind of holy vocation. I really admire that. A lot of artists today seem like the girl or boy next door, just with a slightly more interesting job than most. Emin has never attempted to be ordinary.”
Tracey Emin by Jonathan Jones is out now – you can buy a copy here.