How Tracey Emin Became a Painter

“W hat I did at the Royal College of Art was that I learnt how to paint,” says Tracey Emin. “I was dedicated and focused while I was there. But I was also distraught because it was all so alien to me, everything about it.

“You had to send in a portfolio with works on paper, 20 35mm slides and up to seven sketchbooks. So I, with my 40 sketchbooks, wondered ‘Which ones should I put in? Maybe this one, maybe that one.’

“In the end, I made a selection of seven sketchbooks and sent them in. Apparently, when the tutors [Adrian Berg, Alan Miller and Professor Paul Huxley] saw these, they said, ‘We’ve found one! We’ve found one!’ So I got an interview. Adrian Berg told me later that when they walked into the room with my paintings, they thought—each one of them thought—that they had never seen such bad paintings in their entire life. Their disappointment was incredible, because the sketchbooks and works on paper were amazing. Of course they were, because I could draw really well and I had done printmaking. They asked, ‘Why are the paintings like this?’ I explained it was because I painted with screen inks because I didn’t have the money for oils, and I worked just on wood or whatever I could find. So they said, ‘Why do you want to come here?’ I answered, ‘Because I want to learn to paint. I want to spend two years doing just that.’ They said that it was one of the best answers they’d ever heard. Adrian Berg—‘Bergy baby’—told me later that it was a unanimous decision to let me in, even though they had never seen anyone come to an interview with such bad paintings. ‘Then how come I got a place?’ I wondered. He said, ‘Because when we asked you why you wanted to come here, you said you wanted to learn how to paint. It was so refreshing.’”

One advantage of the Royal College, Emin suspected, was that she could find a mentor and guide there—not a ghostly figure from the past such as Edvard Munch, but a living, functioning contemporary painter.

“At the interview, I mentioned that I wanted to go to the Royal College because Ken Kiff was there. They asked if I knew him, and I said, ‘No, but I really like his work. It would be very good to do an M.A. in a place where there is someone’s work you can relate to. It might be a good connection.’”

Emin later told the Brooklyn Rail how she had investigated Kiff and his work and decided that he would make a suitable teacher for her.

“I could see that Ken liked expressionism. I could see that Ken liked Carl Jung—and I read about Ken, you know, and read reviews of his work and stuff. And for me, it really mattered that I’d be working with a tutor, that it would be someone who I responded to and liked. And who I could talk to about things that I enjoyed.”

It was a revealingly adroit move for a prospective student to make. Emin had selected a suitable teacher for herself in advance—and she was right. Kiff was the ideal instructor for a young painter who was interested in dreams, feelings and myths. She had a high opinion of him and—as it turned out—he was similarly impressed by her. Almost the first thing I ever heard about Tracey Emin, from the critic Norbert Lynton at a dinner in the mid-1990s, was that the people teaching her at the Royal College thought that she was potentially a brilliant painter. That would have been information supplied by Kiff, since Lynton was a friend and major supporter of his.

One lesson that Kiff imparted was that the contemporary art that is fashionable at any given moment is not necessarily what is truly important. With the passage of time, our viewpoint shifts and the view changes. Edward Hopper worked in Paris for extended periods between 1906 and 1910 without apparently noting that fauvism and cubism were happening in the same town. That was not a grave oversight; it was entirely understandable. It is only in retrospect that Matisse, Picasso and Braque seem so obviously, overwhelmingly important.

“One day, Ken walked into college and said, ‘Look at this.’ It was a book of artists from the 1960s and 1970s. I said, ‘I don’t know hardly any of them.’ He said, ‘Exactly. It takes time for people to understand what is really going on, to get perspective on it.’”

In the 1980s, Ken Kiff stood out as an eccentric loner in the London painting scene—but an interesting and prominent one. He was living proof that there was not just one way to paint. He became Emin’s personal tutor for the two years that she was at the Royal College of Art. During that time, she accomplished her aim of finding out in technical detail exactly how painting was done.

“At the end of my first year, I won a massive travel grant, the Ritblat Family Foundation travel scholarship. It was a lot of money. But there was one snag: I could have the scholarship as long as I didn’t travel. Instead, I had to come into the college every day and learn how to stretch and prime canvases and how to work with oil paint. So instead of some holidays, I got a summer’s tuition in painting. I was allowed to have as much canvas and as much paint from any series that I wanted. Ken and Alan Miller [(1941-2009) painter, teacher and senior tutor in painting at the Royal College from 1989] came in once a week. Ken taught me everything about color and compositions. He spent ages showing me what different brushes do and different colors. And Alan taught me about priming, painting, linseed oil, this oil, that oil, everything. The school technician, Peter Allen, taught me how to make stretchers and stretch the canvas. Alan then taught me how to prime them with gesso and make them really tight. I remember when I did my first big oil painting and stretched it up, he came in and said, ‘You’ve done it! You’ve done it!’ It was this big six-foot-by-six-foot painting. It was like, I was off!

“So that was my summer holiday. Looking back on it, it was one of the best things that ever happened to me. It was really good.”

Learning how to paint apart—which was in retrospect a major benefit of her time there—Emin remembers being disappointed by the Royal College and feeling she did not fit in.

“The Royal College of Art was so hard for me. When I was [getting a B.A. in printmaking] at Maidstone College of Art, there was a class thing—a lot of people had accents—but to me it was exciting and wonderful in lots of ways. You could argue, you could debate, you could discuss things. When I went to the Royal College, I thought this is going to be amazing. It wasn’t. I did not feel part of it all. I remember going into the office and saying, ‘I’m going back [home] to [the working-class seaside town of] Margate. Where are the Black people, where are the fat people, where are the thick people? Where are the real people? There are none of them here.’ And I walked out. They called my mum and said, ‘She’s got to come back, otherwise she’ll be expelled,’ or something.”

Another important teacher of Emin’s at the Royal College was her external tutor Paula Rego. It is hard to think of another more suitable painter to instruct her, as she acknowledged:

“When you think about it, Ken Kiff and Paula Rego, I was really lucky. Because in the 1980s, everybody was just moving into some kind of neo-conceptual, postmodernist ideas. And we really weren’t.”

When Emin and Rego exhibited together at the Foundling Museum, London, in 2010, Gill Hedley noted that they recalled only “discussing men, not art.” But then relationships with men—and along with them love, loss, sex and sexual violence—were preoccupations of both as painters and as people. There is nothing neo-conceptual or postmodernist about those topics. Looking back from decades later, it seems obvious that Rego (1935-2022) was one of the most brilliant painters working in Britain in the 1980s and 1990s. But it did not necessarily seem like that at the time. When she was teaching Emin at the Royal College, Rego was in her mid-50s and only just beginning to achieve fame and success. Late in her life, a number of fellow artists, all women, jointly interviewed Rego, and Emin asked her whether she had ever felt unappreciated. She replied, “I’ve felt frustrated and broke. It was an enormous relief whenever I sold a picture.” Emin herself was to feel much the same in the early 1990s, after she left art school.

“Because I had got a grant from the hardship fund at the Royal College of Art, as well as the big travel scholarship and a bursary, it meant that they could choose any painting of mine to go into the college collection. And they picked a picture that I had done of my two grandmothers, my English nan and my Turkish one, who died when she was 36 of typhoid. I put them together at a table and thought this was really interesting. I had put me in the painting at first, but then I took myself out and put a vase of flowers there instead.

“So the college chose that painting. But it was my favorite one of all. One day, I waited until Stan, who was the gatekeeper, was on his tea break. Then I took his keys and went upstairs to where all the paintings were stored. I swapped the painting of my grandmothers with a really bad painting. In fact, this painting was so bad that I’d thrown it away. I took it out of the bin and restretched it so that I could substitute it, because it was the same size. It’s got a line down the middle where it had been folded in half. On the back I wrote, ‘Really sorry. But I love my nan too much to part with her. (I could have sold this one.) It’s a good picture too. Thank you Tracey.’

“At the Royal College, I was nobody. I was never going to be missed; I was never going to be remembered; nobody gave a fuck about my work. Actually, I was treated a bit regressively, because they felt sorry for me. They thought I didn’t get it, didn’t understand what was happening in art. What I was doing was what was happening in my head. My degree show was hung in the basement, underneath a shelf, basically, so nobody saw it. I was not one of the ‘wow kids.’ So they had taken this painting because I’d had a bursary, but they didn’t really care about it. It would probably just disappear into obscurity. I thought it was better that I had the painting that I wanted. So I swapped it over.

“Two years later, when I was pregnant, broke, had no studio, nowhere to live, at the end of my tether, having to leave my studio at Elephant and Castle, I was so distraught that I threw all my paintings away. Because I couldn’t look after them. It was like, if I can’t have them, no one will.

“Then, lo and behold, I got a bit of a name for myself. There was an event at the Serpentine Gallery that we all went to, and the dinner afterwards was in the senior common room at the Royal College of Art. It was full of all these people sitting at this big table. Then the person next to me said, ‘I’m going to ask to change places.’ I asked why and he said, ‘I just can’t stand the painting I’m looking at. It’s so awful!’ Then the person next to him said, ‘Yes, it’s really bad! How could anyone do something that bad?’

“I said, ‘Maybe the person knew it was bad when they did it.’ I was with [artist] Mat [Collishaw] at the time, and afterwards I told him that it was my painting. ‘I know it’s really bad. That’s why I gave it to them!’ The Royal College said later that they would probably hang it the other way round in the future, showing the writing on the back. I said, ‘Yes please!’ The moral of the story is that, when you are eternally grateful to someone, and they ask you for something, give them the best that you have, not the worst. Otherwise, it will come back and bite you, like it did in that situation. I couldn’t even defend the painting, because it was so awful.”

Even if one were to include that picture, which obviously no curator would wish to do, there are not enough of Emin’s early paintings in existence to put together an exhibition, or at least perhaps only a small one. The reason is that they were destroyed, not by accident or neglect but deliberately by the artist who had made them. There are just a few survivors.

“There’s a small ‘Mother and Child’ somewhere, and there’s possibly a ‘Marriage at Cana’ and a ‘Last Supper,’ but who knows? There was something I really liked about them, but they were pretty morose. They were not happy-go-lucky paintings; they were really somber. I was really somber, really sad, at the time.”

It is not unusual for artists to destroy works they decide are not good enough to survive. Chaïm Soutine was known to burn rejected pictures, so was Francis Bacon. Freud put his boot through dozens. But this was not the case with Emin. “It wasn’t because I didn’t care about them,” she has explained. “It was because I cared about them too much.”

_{Excerpted from My Heart is This: Tracey Emin on Painting, by Martin Gayford © 2026 Thames & Hudson Ltd, London. Text by Martin Gayford © 2025 Martin Gayford. Text by Tracey Emin © 2025 Tracey Emin. Reprinted by permission of Thames & Hudson Inc., thamesandhudsonusa.com}