Tracey Emin has gone from fear and numbness to angrily shouting at a stranger to losing herself in painting, her lockdown diary reveals.
The artist has been sharing her life on Instagram with a daily diary of written thoughts, images and short film from her bathroom and studio.
The diary was commissioned by White Cube gallery and will be followed by week-long Instagram diaries from other artists including Antony Gormley and Sarah Morris.
Susan May, the gallery’s artistic director, said it was a way of staying connected with voices “who often help us to look at the world in a different way”.
“Collective experience is something artists are able to communicate so effectively, and at a time when so many of us are confined in ways beyond our control, art and artists can in some way help us try to make sense of the situation.”
Emin’s diary is, typically, rawly autobiographical. On day one there was film of her in the bath with a tray of coffee and hot cross buns and the sound of water pouring in from the taps. She wrote: “Today I would be happy.. today I would celebrate my solitude.. if I were not filled with an over powering sense of fear.. A darkness.. that has made me want to live more than ever.”
On day three she wrote: “I’m angry.. but I don’t have the energy to show it.. it’s living inside me, festering, moving around, doing a takeover of my soul.” She shouted at a stranger: “Get between the lines, you fucking idiot.”
On other days there was short footage from her studio, where she talked about a painting she had been working on for six months. “It’s not finished … it’s never finished.”
Day six and Emin was filming her studio at 4.45am, pointing out the sofa on which she sleeps, “if I sleep”. By day seven, “the last day for now”, she had painted “I wanted you to fuck me so much I couldn’t paint any more” on the artwork.
The Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones said the diary was “not just a trenchant response to these frightening times but a subtle meditation on how art can rise to them”.
He added: “It starts out as an apparently random account of her self-isolation at her Spitalfields home, but becomes a short story about the life of an artist. It’s actually rather optimistic because it shows how to exist in solitude – inside your feelings, your perceptions, your creativity.”
Jones noted that the epic canvas Emin was working on kept getting blacker. “She can’t stop herself slapping on more black. In a plague year, is there any other colour to paint?”
Emin is one of a number of contemporary artists using Instagram during the lockdown. Damien Hirst’s posts are cheerful insights from the studio about the way he works. On Wednesday he wrote “I love paint” and posted a short film from his studio on progress with new enormous cherry blossom paintings.
The trunks and branches of the trees he painted were too thick, he said. The solution? Painting blue lines of sky showing through the middle of them. “It’s building up layers,” he says. “I didn’t like these until now.”
Other artists are giving practical advice. Kara Walker, the American artist whose giant fountain filled Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall until its closure, has been posting #confinementbookclub tips, the latest being Wade Davis’s The Serpent and the Rainbow.
The artist Bob and Roberta Smith has been posting regular #StayAtHome art tasks such as, on Friday morning, painting clouds and a statement to a loved one.
He said: “I think artists, writers, poets, musicians, composers have a responsibility to keep working and keep doing things. Other people are continuing to work, NHS workers, the corner shop, refuse workers … so we should. It’s important because it is now that people really understand what culture is all about.”
