Ed Worley stares at the cartoon characters mounted on gallery walls. Here’s Mickey Mouse, there’s Donald Duck and Bugs Bunny, to the left Charlie Brown, to the right a Smurf. They are beautifully painted – clean, sharp, luminous. But there’s something going on here. Take Bugs Bunny. There’s not one bunny, there are multiple bunnies. Identical images tumble over each other, crash into each other, poke through each other, and hang upside down at impossible angles.
Look at them long enough and they turn into abstracts. Bugsy’s open mouth becomes a strawberry floating in space. The paintings couldn’t be more obvious or joyful, yet when you focus they become confusing, claustrophobic, trippy – cartoon Bridget Rileys. “This was the inside of my head,” says Worley, who paints under the name Opake. “I lived in an insane environment. The insanity in my head. Psychosis daily.”
At 34, Worley has had a remarkable life: a public schoolboy with everything ahead of him, then a crack-cocaine addict who spent eight years on and off the streets, homeless, psychotic, a thief, a brawler, a drug dealer, a graffiti artist, and now a successful artist with his first solo gallery exhibition.
It’s no coincidence that Worley has chosen to paint these cartoon characters. Nor is it a coincidence that he has painted them obsessively. After all, Bugs Bunny is one of the iconic Looney Tunes characters, while “bugsy” is old-fashioned slang for crazy. Even before Worley reimagined them, they represented a form of madness: forever scrapping, chasing and being chased, hyper lives lived at supersonic speed.
“Think of Looney Tunes,” he says, “and it’s all about the anticipation, then the chaos and then it finishes. And that’s how I lived. Anticipation to pick up drugs was probably the best bit. The chaos of getting them, then finishing them and going again.” Worley points to his painting of a cluster of Charlie Browns and laughs. “There’s another one with severe mental health issues. He’s always depressed.”
Worley was born into a working-class family in Essex. His father opened a gallery and before long owned a dozen. His parents hung around with arty types, including some enthusiastic drinkers and pot smokers. There was always booze around, Worley says. So naturally, he tried it and liked it. At the age of nine, he and a friend nicked a bottle of wine and a bottle of Bacardi from his father’s alcohol cupboard and polished them off.
At 11, his parents sent him to the prestigious public school Uppingham, Rutland, where he was treated as an outsider. Fellow students dismissed him as nouveau riche, with his Essex accent and called him “chav”. In the holidays he’d come home and mix with a different world – tough kids who drank, smoked weed and graffitied trains.
Although he didn’t like his school he had wonderful art teachers. “Mr Hudson and Mr Sharpe were phenomenal so I thrived, but everything else was hard.” He got almost full marks in his art A-level and went to the University of Leeds to study cinematography. That’s when he got seriously into drugs – pretty much everything except heroin. He became a nocturnal creature. By day he slept (in the first year he failed the exam, but was allowed to return), by night he raved, graffitied, took and dealt drugs. He learned to cook ketamine and then undercut the local dealers. He was having a great time, he says, but his appearance told a different story. Worley became sallow, dirty and underweight.
Somehow he graduated. Back home in Essex, life became increasingly dangerous. By now he was an addict but he managed to get a job in a gallery. One day a drug dealer he owed money to turned up. “He took a massive blade out of his trousers and said, ‘You owe me 30 grand.’ I just laughed at him because I was so nervous and told him I didn’t have it. He said, ‘I’m going to kill you and your mum and dad.” In the end, the dealer took a less violent revenge. “His mate came in and they cleared the artwork from the gallery.”
By now Worley was suffering from psychosis. “It began as a whisper, then I started seeing shadows moving. My mum and dad live in an old farmhouse in Essex. It’s beautiful, but it makes a lot of noise. One night, I totally lost control. It has two stairwells and I ran round the stairwells chasing after two people who weren’t there for about six hours with a kitchen knife in my boxer shorts. It was all in my head. That became an everyday thing.”
Worley stresses that his parents were caring and loving, determined to do their best for him. “They always had my back, but I was making decisions in my life that made it impossible for them to have me around. And I didn’t want to be around. I wanted to isolate.” When his father tried to have it out with him, Worley climbed out of his bedroom window, jumped on to the pavement and left.
That was the start of his homeless years. Initially he sofa-surfed with friends who hadn’t given up on him. Then he began sleeping in underground stations, doorways, wheelie bins and on park benches. It wasn’t one continual stretch of homelessness. Sometimes he would return home for as long as he or his parents could cope. This was the pattern for the next eight years. “I had a bag with loads of jumpers and I’d roll up newspaper and use that as insulation between layers of clothing.”
Back then, he says, he was a different person. “I became something I didn’t recognise. I had no off switch. If people wanted to have a fight with me, I’d take it to any level they wanted to go. Drugs strip you of your dignity, your self-respect, they take everything bit by bit.” He didn’t attempt to make friends on the streets. All he cared about was where he would get his next fix and drink.
He became ever more reckless, stealing from drug dealers. “I went into those situations thinking, ‘If this guy is going to kill me, then wicked, I haven’t got to wake up tomorrow.’ I’ve had a gun put to my head numerous times. The violence was constant.” The psychosis got worse. Worley found himself on pub roofs, trying to escape from police officers in riot gear who only existed in his head. “This is like a fucking war story,” he says apologetically, telling me he’s only speaking about it now because he’s got through it. “I want to talk about transferring all of that to a positive because that’s the big thing for me.”
Today, he is quietly spoken, polite and solicitous. Worley has not taken drugs or drunk alcohol for five years. Getting clean and sober was neither easy nor linear. So many factors played their part. He returned home to his parents, joined Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous, found the perfect therapist (a former addict), fell in love with his partner Ruth, became a father and dedicated himself to his art in the way he had done to his addictions.
“I now feverishly work the way I pursued drugs and alcohol,” he says. How long does he work on a typical day? “Minimum nine hours up to 18.” Initially his art was primarily a way of giving his days structure and not succumbing to old habits. Even now, he says: “The process of painting is as important as the outcome: what it means for my mental health.”
Around five years ago, Worley started working for an art publisher and making money. “I was getting a couple of grand a month and it was going in my bank account so it felt really special.” Back then, his work was graffiti-based, or featured more literal copies of cartoon characters. When he discovered the publisher was getting around 90% of the money, he left and sold his work on Instagram. “I know how to hustle,” he says. “It’s ingrained in me from being an addict.”
His work evolved. He realised it was replicating his life as an addict – with one big difference. “Every day I would repeat the same actions over and over, but expect a different outcome. And it was always obviously the same. That’s how addicts live. In my work, I take an image and repeat it and repeat it and repeat it until I get an abstract picture. I repeat it until I get a different outcome, so in my head that breaks that cycle of insanity.” In other words, his art has become his way of proving to himself that he can be true to his obsessive, repetitive nature and still change.
Last year, the man who survived by robbing people for his next hit made around £300,000 from selling art. He talks with pride of the small Victorian house he owns with Ruth, the open fire in their living room and having enough money to bring up their two children. This year, with the economy tanking, selling art online became a tougher proposition. So Worley looked for a new business model: the traditional one of selling through galleries. In September, he was offered a contract with one of the country’s biggest. It may well have made him financially secure for life, but at the last moment he had second thoughts. “They buy everything upfront. It was an amazing offer, but I was going to become a number in a huge machine and it’s not for me. It’s not what I’m about.”
In the end, he signed with Quantus, an up-and-coming London gallery that shares his vision. His first exhibition has just launched, not with champagne and canapes but a breakfast for aspiring artists who have come through the care system and have experienced mental health problems. Some of his paintings are being auctioned to raise money for the homelessness charity Centrepoint and the mental health charity Mind. Worley hopes people who don’t usually attend galleries will find Quantus and his work accessible.
We catch up a day after the launch and Worley is buzzing. The artists he met at the breakfast were so inspiring, he says. “I was blown away.” Now he hopes to set up a studio to work with them, helping them produce and merchandise their art to the big retailers. “If we get product lines made up, they can start earning and hopefully get to a better place.” If he’s managed to do it, he says, there’s no reason why they can’t. “I want to give people hope that it’s possible to get out of any situation. If just one of them takes anything from my work, that’s a positive.”
Sanity Through Repetition by Opake is at the Quantus Gallery, London, until 19 November. Watch Opake at work on his Instagram.
