The start of the new year brings with it the so-called “Blue Monday”, a name given to a day in January - typically the third Monday of the month - said to embody a sense of unavoidable gloom. It has come to symbolize winter fatigue, abandoned resolutions, and a deep longing for light. Yet what if we approached the blues not as something to resist, but as a companion on a path toward deeper self-understanding?

Tracey Emin (b. 1963) offers a radical meditation on this very idea through her intimate work. In the two portfolios These Feelings Were True (2020) and A Journey to Death (2021), each lithograph functions as an autobiographical glimpse, a fragment of an inner diary translated into intensely personal self-portraits. Raw, bittersweet, and unflinchingly honest, the works capture love, loss, longing, and the tender vulnerabilities of being human. Emin does not aestheticize sadness; she inhabits it, allowing emotion to remain unresolved, exposed, and profoundly human.

These Feelings Were True (Set of 8)

2020

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Emin’s focus on the self recalls the confessional power of Expressionist painting. She has long cited Edvard Munch (1863 - 1944) and Egon Schiele (1890 - 1918) as formative influences, both for their daring emotional exposure and their expressive handling of the human figure. Like them, Emin uses figuration as a conduit for inner life, transforming private experience into something shared. By making herself the subject, she also situates her work within a longer art-historical lineage of female self-representation, one that reclaims the nude and the self-portrait as sites of agency rather than objectification.

This lineage extends into the practices of other artists who have embraced melancholia as a generative force. Louise Bourgeois (1911 - 2010), for instance, spent decades returning to memory, grief, and psychological pain as core material, transforming personal trauma into acts of emotional excavation through drawing and sculpture. Francesca Woodman (1958 - 1981), working primarily through photographic self-portraiture, approached similar themes more quietly, using her own body as a fragile, often blurred or fragmented presence suspended between visibility and disappearance. Emin, as well as Bourgeois and Woodman, understands vulnerability as a means of confronting love, loss, identity, and the inner life.

Across these practices, melancholia emerges not as weakness but as a lens. It invites introspection and a closer engagement with our private worlds. To dwell in these blue spaces is to witness; to acknowledge and honour the full spectrum of feeling that shapes our inner lives. There is an intimacy in recognizing sadness, and a quiet courage in sitting with one’s own emotions without immediate escape.

This January, as the winter light remains low and the days feel long, Emin’s work reminds us that there is value in introspection. By embracing melancholia, we reconnect with ourselves: our histories, our desires, and our capacity for empathy and reflection. Sometimes, the most profound encounters are not outward at all, but with our own unguarded hearts.

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