Happy Birthday to @traceyeminstudio, an artist who has had a profound impact on me. Cannot wait for her ‘Tracey Emin / Edvard Munch: The Loneliness of the Soul’ show later this year @royalacademyarts.

In the meantime, we can treat ourselves to her ‘I Thrive on Solitude’ exhibition in @whitecube’s online viewing room until 2 Aug. During a period of isolation in her London home – which she will be leaving after living in it for 20 years – Emin created a series of works which centre on the home as haven.

Seeing these works reminded me of certain lines from Baudelaire’s ‘The Artist’s Confiteor’:

“…Penetrating to the very point of pain, for there are certain delicious sensations, which, while imprecise, are not without intensity; and no blade has a keener tip than that of Infinity… The solitude, the silence, the incomparable chastity of all that azure!… imitating in its minuteness and its solitude my own irrepressible existence, the monotonous melody of the surge, all these things think through me, and I through them (for in the grandeur of reverie, the sense of self soon fades!); they think, as I say, but in music and pictures … And yet, these thoughts, whether they come from me or spring from objects, soon become too intense. When energy combines with sensual delight it creates a mental malaise and positive pain…”