Dear Tracey

Dear Tracey,

We have never met. I just wanted to write you this letter of thanks. Thank you for your work. Thank you for your life's struggle. Though the road may have been rough at times, it brought you to where you are now. Art is so often a product of pain.

Thank you for sharing My Bed with the world. It can't have been easy but, for me, it provided an introduction and a revelation. It introduced me to you and to your work. For that I am grateful. I have seen many of your works since. I saw My Bed at the Tate when it returned there some ten years ago now. I can still see it there and I can feel it.

Art is for feeling not for looking (Emin)

Thank you for the feeling, less so the looking, though looking is how we first experience art. When I spent time with My Bed at Tate Britain (in 2014 I think), I did a lot of looking. I looked at the work from every horizontal angle. Shame I couldn't see it from above (or for that matter below). I walked around and around, seeing the work move as I moved. The gallery staff must have found this irritating. One day I heard a little girl ask her mum why there was a messy bed there. Why indeed?

For several days, I came back and repeated this experience, getting to know My Bed, trying to grasp the meaning within the work, the intentions and experience of the artist. To try to look, as often I do, through the eyes of the artist. I thought I had caught a glimpse of the person whose bed it was, or was modelled on. I thought I came to know, just a little, that person. I wanted to give them a hug and say, "It's alright. It will be okay. This is the place you will move on from.

Art, once shown, no longer belongs to the artist (Taylor)

Through your work, this so powerful installation, this unashamed (or perhaps ashamed) expression of what you were and where you were some time past, through you seeing a work of art in something that the rest of us would not, you reached out through time and place to people like me. I could feel you, I could feel this feeling. Of course, I don't know if the feeling I felt was what you felt but that is true of all art. The artist casts their work upon the world for the world to respond to. The artist does not control that response, only the casting of the work. Art, once shown, belongs not to the artist but to the rest of us.

Thank you for all of this

Thank you for introducing me to your work with My Bed. The small gouache on paper works that were hung around the room had a powerful impact on me, particularly I could feel you. I bought a print copy as a gift for my father. I don't think he knew your work before then but was delighted when he saw this one. It was given a place of honour in his home, where it stayed for the rest of his life. He was an artist who worked mostly in watercolour, sometimes in other media. I have the framed print now, right by my bed, and frequently look at it. I could feel you. I can feel you now, Dad. I can feel you, Mum. I can feel you, Tracey. Thanks for the feeling.

Thank you for the introduction to Francis Bacon. My visits to see My Bed also brought me to Bacon's work for the first time. You wanted Bacon's Dog, 1952, displayed with My Bed because of the influence Bacon had had on you. I can still feel Dog and have since viewed the work at a Bacon exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. I have taken time to look at quite a few Bacon works, including Triptych August 1972, which I gave a visitor talk on when the work was newly rehung at Tate Britain.

I have since been fascinated by selected Bacon works in the NPG exhibition. Not least another triptych on the same theme of August 1972, both a response to the death of Bacon's partner, George Dyer. Without the artistic path you showed me, I may never have come to appreciate Bacon's work.

I never stopped loving you

Finally, I would like to say thank you for never falling out of love with Margate, your home by the sea in Kent.

I hope to be joining you there in a year or two. We will be neighbours. Perhaps we will even bump into each other some time. I do hope so.

Thank you for all of this. Thank you for the feeling. Thank you for the wealth of art you have given. Thank you for supporting other artists through the Tracey Emin foundation.

Your life be blessed.

Sincerely,

Ray