n Tracey Emin’s intimate blue paintings of her life in lockdown we see her daydreaming and remembering, looking out of windows or at a familiar old sofa as the interior of her 18th-century house in London becomes a stage set for her private meditations. She depicts herself positively basking in isolation. Emin once said her favourite artist is Johannes Vermeer. The new paintings in her online White Cube exhibition, entitled I Thrive on Solitude, which has just launched, are domestic reveries in the tradition of Vermeer or, if you prefer a modernist comparison, Pierre Bonnard. The show’s title is self-explanatory. But in a Zoom event to launch it, she revealed to the 40 invited guests exactly how perversely inspiring she has found the coronavirus lockdown. Appearing from her studio in leopard-print specs with a huge volcanic red painting behind her, she enthused about the experience of being socially distanced and how it has unleashed a new creative happiness. I was fascinated because my encounters with Emin over several years have revealed a paradoxical person, torn between her desire to paint in peace and her highly developed social skills. From intense, mutually profitable friendships with her art dealers to getting Mark Carney, the then-governor of the Bank of England, to serve snacks at her 2018 Christmas party, she has a genius for worldly engagement. If she makes her life a novel it’s a sprawling social epic, a modern Vanity Fair. But really she would rather be alone. Why, I asked in the Zoom event, did she lock down in London – was it by choice or accident? Her usual hiding place, where she can escape the art world for months on end to work, is her hilltop residence and semi-wild estate (she prefers “garden”) in the south of France. It turns out she was planning to spend the pandemic there. However, Macron locked down France so suddenly she had to abandon the plan. Instead she’s found herself living in London in a quiet way she never thought possible. She says artist friends including Gary Hume have found the lockdown just as creatively liberating as herself. “All of them!” Not that Emin is trivialising the tragedy of Covid-19. “My cousin died.” But according to her it could be very healthy for the art world. It turns out to be no loss, she says, to get up and think about art rather than heading to the airport to get to Miami or Basel. “You’re better off staying at home reading a book about Velázquez than jetting off to the next art fair.” She adds that she’s been “banned” from most of the art fairs anyway. But she thinks the art world should learn from the quarantine that it doesn’t need to be as busy and restless. Letting artists be, giving them time alone to create, might be a very good thing. She believes online shows and events have allowed a more intimate and serious approach to art. She doesn’t share the “cynical” view that you need to experience art in a gallery. And jokingly she adds – with White Cube’s Jay Jopling there – that she wants fewer global art events so her gallerists won’t have heart attacks from their constant travel. I am nodding along at my screen because I know this is all true, at least for Emin personally. I’ve seen how she’s simultaneously one of the biggest stars in the art world, and a serious artist who cares about nothing more than painting alone. She’s also, of course, a gifted communicator who openly shares her most personal life with everyone. The new paintings, with their detailed scenes in her lounge, bedroom and bathroom, are, she reveals, partly a farewell to the Spitalfields house that she’s about to leave after 18 years. She never expected to live alone here, she says. Now she’s going to move into a home with a small living space and extensive studio facilities so there’s no gap between life and creation. It is designed for living alone. But actually, she adds exuberantly, she doesn’t expect to be alone. Artistically, I hope she gets plenty of solitude. Because her new paintings are another engrossing chapter in her journey from 90s wild child to one of the most serious and courageous artists around. She insists these new paintings are not “pictures” – and clearly they’re not pictures in the way David Hockney does pictures. But they do reveal Emin’s pictorial abilities to anyone who might doubt them as her familiar surroundings become poetic registers of her feelings. In truth I don’t think the lockdown has changed Emin, just made her solitary way of life more respectable. It has enabled her to come out as an isolate. Work really is all she cares about and it necessitates solitude. A few months before lockdown I visited her in the house her new paintings commemorate. We chatted in her bedroom because she was feeling ill after weeks of nothing but passionate painting in France. I’d just seen some of the results: fierce, sometimes frenzied canvases teetering somewhere between abstract expressionism and raw sex. Lockdown has let Tracey Emin reveal herself as the obsessed artist she truly is.