Life Drawing: Looking at Tracey Emin

We looked at several different artists during our life drawing session, but the one who caught my eye was Tracey Emin. Her simple drawings catch the movements of the people so delicately, but by using harsh and almost rushed looking lines. Many of her drawings reflect her insecurities, her sex life and often empower her. She told the guardian, “This is one of my favourite drawings – it’s one of the Margate series. The text on it reads: “harder and better than all you fucking bastards”. What I find interesting about it is the memory of myself as a girl, yet I have drawn the body of a fully grown woman. Sometimes as a teenager, after I had sex, I felt very unloved and used. Often the men I slept with would taunt me, sometimes about my body. This is what provoked me into making this drawing.” 

These are exactly the sort of topics I’m interested in as they link into feminism tremendously well. Her other art works that I looked into during the life drawing session were these;

I very much enjoyed working freely without any sort of preparation or planning, something I’m very guilty of doing when I draw people. To get started with, we experimented by only drawing the space around the model, not her. This left a white figure in the dark space around her which left an interesting effect to the drawing, very much like Tracey Emin’s simple black and white drawings. We then went on to only using one colour to paint the model, which is also difficult if you usually draw and paint with detail, as I do. However, I enjoyed the process because it was a lot quicker and freer process, and the end result was also an interesting contemporary and abstract finish. The cut-outs were also fun, and I also pushed myself further by only letting myself cut through the paper once to get the shape (except for the holes to show the gaps between the arm and stomach), which gave me a different looking figure because of the proportions. I was pleased with it because it gave me ideas of body proportions/symmetry for my Inside/Outside project, as well as it linking with Tracey Emin’s work with body positivity.