Tracey Emin is one of those artists whose name is known to a wider public beyond those who follow contemporary art. The broader public recognition she enjoys is probably due to an artwork she first created in 1998, My Bed. That installation, plus her association with the Young British Artists (YBA) group that emerged in the late 1980s, has given her a degree of celebrity that few artists of her generation have achieved.

Her work has embraced many media including installations, photography, and video, but in recent years she has focused on painting. Martin Gayford’s most recent book, My Heart is This: Tracey Emin on Painting, captures a series of conversations with the artist about her painting and her influences. Gayford has become something of a “painter whisperer”, having written excellent, critically acclaimed books about Lucian Freud and David Hockney.

I haven’t yet made up my mind about Emin as a painter and Gayford’s book, interesting and insightful as it is, didn’t do much to convince me about the importance of her work. It did, however, do something it intended to do, make the reader go back to the paintings and look more closely and carefully. Emin would be happy about that.