Tracey Emin is one of the most widely admired artists working in Britain today. Martin Gayford is an art critic who has spent the better part of his career in conversation with artists, uncovering what art means to them. In My Heart is This: Tracey Emin on Painting, the pair come together in a revealing conversation around the artist’s extraordinary life and career.
Above, left: Tracey Emin in her London studio, 2024. Photograph Jean-François Jaussaud. © 2026 Tracey Emin/ Above, right: We all Bleed, 2023. Acrylic on canvas, 122.2 × 122 × 3.5 cm (481/8 × 48 × 13/8 in.). Photo Ollie Harrop. © 2026 Tracey Emin
Martin Gayford (MG): One of my favourite quotations from Vincent van Gogh’s letters is about the difficulty of making a good painting, which is no easier than it is ‘to find a diamond or a pearl’. It is terribly hard and ‘you stake your life’ on it. Do you find the same thing?tracey
Tracey Emin (TE): Years ago, for me, painting was difficult, difficult, difficult. Then in 2016, when my mum died, I decided that I was going to stop it from being so difficult. I was going make it as easy as possible. So I made a rule that I couldn’t repeat an image twice. I could do the same drawing again and again and again, and every drawing would be different. But what I couldn’t do was take a drawing and blow it up onto a canvas or make a big drawing and try to produce the same emotion of that moment again. I had to have a brand new moment. At the beginning, I thought, ‘I’m going to paint a picture of my mum, or I’m going to do this or I’m going to do that.’ Then, after I short while, I never knew what I was doing.
MG: Robert Rauschenberg said something like that to me once: ‘I want to be the first one to not know what I am going to do next. For my own excitement, I would also like to be the first one to be confused and bewildered by what it was I did do next, after I’ve done it.’ Then he added, ‘You can’t have that with a plan.’ So you’re not thinking your paintings out in advance as some artists do – as even Van Gogh did, spontaneous as his pictures look.
TE: I’m not thinking out anything. The giant crucifixion in the studio at the moment didn’t start as a crucifixion at all. I did a really bad figure drawing, then drew the hill I think, then drew the other figures. To be free in what you do, and to have your own language marked out for you by what you do, is the greatest freedom. I didn’t know this was possible when I was younger. I knew that there was something there that you went towards as an artist, but I didn’t know that it was this, because you don’t know about it until you do it.
Years ago, for me, painting was difficult, difficult, difficult. Then in 2016, when my mum died, I decided that I was going to stop it from being so difficult. I was going make it as easy as possible. - Tracey Emin
The Crucifixion, 2025. Acrylic on canvas, 202.8 × 280.4 × 3.5 cm (797/8 × 1103/8 × 13/8 in.) © 2026 Tracey Emin
MG: When did you begin working like this?
TE: A lot of the things I was doing before the cancer were good and definitely on their way. I think I was doing it, but I was frightened that I was doing it. Then after the cancer, I stopped being frightened and understood what I was doing.
Painting can be like a seance. You ask, ‘Is anybody there? Are you friendly? If you are, knock three times.’ Everybody’s really scared. ‘Do you know any of us? If you do, knock twice.’ Then everybody wonders who it is. ‘Is it my mum? Is it my dad?’ ‘Are related to anybody in the room?’ Yes, they are. ‘Are you Enver?’ No. ‘Are you Pam?’ ‘It’s my mum! It’s my mum!’ The paintings are like that. First of all, you say ‘What have I done? What have I done?’ Then it gets warmer and warmer and warmer. I was talking to a yoga person, and they were claiming that the level of meditation in yoga is very different from painting. I asked why and they replied, ‘In painting you have something at the end of it, whereas meditation is just being free.’ I said, nicely, ‘What do you know about painting?’ He asked me, ‘How do you paint?’
‘It sometimes comes from behind you and goes through you’, I answered. ‘And as it goes through you – bamm! – you catch it all on the canvas, there. It can come back again, and it fills you with this amazing strength of feeling. Or if it doesn’t, it’s there on the canvas for everybody to feel. It can emanate out.’ This guy just looked at me; he really wasn’t expecting that. I said, ‘It’s not about making a picture.’
Painting can be like a seance. You ask, ‘Is anybody there? Are you friendly? If you are, knock three times. - Tracey Emin
I Saw you Coming like a Bird, 2024. Acrylic on canvas, 203.1 × 280.3 × 3.5 cm (80 × 1103/8 × 13/8 in.). © 2026 Tracey Emin
MG: I suppose if you want to surprise yourself, you can’t do something you already know. So you’ve got to find a way of making something that you don’t know.
TE: Yes. I want a painting to tell me something that I didn’t know before, not something I already knew. The more surprises I give myself, the more I learn and the more excited I am by it. Some of my paintings look like things that we might have seen before, because we know what they are: two lovers in a bed, blah blah blah. They are classic images that we know. It’s like the words in my neons: you think you’ve heard them in a song or read them in a poem or seen them in a quote from someone. But they’re not that; they are, more or less, a universal thought that goes around in people’s heads, which I put it into words.
But often I manage to make a painting where I’ve never seen anything like it before in my life and it just totally freaks me out. Usually, when I’ve done that, I want to paint over it or change it; I find it really unsettling. We have to hide the painting. But then I will look at it later. Often it is the breakthrough for something else. On its own, it tells me something that I never knew before – something big. It’s like going to a soothsayer or tarot reader. You walk away thinking that that was a load of rubbish. But then later on, it all comes into fruition. Similarly, you have this painting and you think, ‘God, that’s really mad, it’s awful, it’s a bit embarrassing!’ Then later on you realize that the reason you feel like that is that you are suffering from being the person responsible for making it, for bringing it into the world, because you’ve never seen anything like it before. And you have to deal with the consequences of that. It’s a hard thing, but fun. It’s exciting.
I want a painting to tell me something that I didn’t know before, not something I already knew. The more surprises I give myself, the more I learn and the more excited I am by it. - Tracey Emin
Above, left: The Ship, 2019. Acrylic on canvas, 152.5 × 182.2 × 3.7 cm (597/8 × 715/8 × 11/4 in.) Photo Prudence Cuming Associates © 2026 Tracey Emin/ Above, right: Tracey Emin No. 1, Margate 2025. © Juergen Teller, All Rights Reserved.
MG: So the process is a struggle?
TE: Let me tell you something funny. These days, I can’t lift up big canvases like I used to, but often Harry and I will move them across the studio together. Sometimes I think, ‘Fucking hell, this one’s really heavy!’ Then I look and on the side of the canvas there’s so much paint, five layers even, because I’ve painted over it again and again and again and again. Even though they are very thin layers of paint, building up five layers makes it really heavy.
The one with the text you can see is just two layers of paint. If I was to paint over that one, I might draw – I don’t know – a woman lying back. Then I might think, ‘That’s a bit boring.’ Or ‘I don’t like her leg.’ So I get rid of the leg. But then I think, ‘That’s a bit odd because it looks as though her body is twisting.’ Next I might paint some blue underneath and think that it looks like the sea. And then I might paint over the woman altogether. So I’d have a canvas that was just blue with the faint words ‘I don’t want’ coming through. That changes everything, because it’s like ‘I don’t want blue, I don’t want the sea.’ And my mind’s working differently from before. My mind goes on a kind of journey. So my painting isn’t boring for me. It isn’t technical. It’s not an exercise. It’s just me, moving through the canvas and moving through the ideas.
My Heart is This: Tracey Emin on Painting by Martin Gayford is available now.
