Opake on his boundary-pushing art: 'I don't think there's anything more taboo than hentai porn'
Opake has taken over this week's Big Issue magazine as a guest editor – bringing his friends and some unique original art. We caught up with him at his studio to learn more
Opake is this week's Big Issue guest editor. But what lays behind his eye-catching collaboration with Slawn? Image: Gemma Day
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In preparation for meeting Ed Worley, I looked up how much it would cost to buy one of his artworks. Just over £14,000 was the answer. It wasn’t always that way.
“The first thing I sold was a picture for my mate Shelly. She wanted a drawing of her dog,” Worley told me.
“It was the best £20 I’ve ever earned, because it was legit. I’d had money go through my hands prior to that, lumps of money, but it had no meaning, no value.”
Better known as Opake, Worley has taken over this week’s Big Issue magazine. It’s a celebration of the outsider, the product of the graffiti artist gathering together his friends and producing a range of original artwork. It’s no small thing, handing a magazine over to a band of graffiti artists and rebels, but the results are striking.
“To be totally blunt, I want to raise some money for the Big Issue. This is how people eat, selling that magazine, and have done for a long time. If I can participate in them being able to eat, I’m here for that,” he told me.
If you pick up this week’s Big Issue, you’ll learn all about the project – and get your hands on an exclusively-made print. But, during a conversation with Worley as the collaboration came to fruition, the artist gave an insight into his turbulent backstory and the inspiration behind the eye-catching art he’s produced for us – all conducted while I sat on a broken camping chair in his east London studio. Readers of the Inside the Big Issue newsletter got to read this interview first – sign up for free to get a look behind the scenes every week.
Advertising helps fund Big Issue’s mission to end poverty
Advertising helps fund Big Issue’s mission to end poverty
Opake gets creative with a Big Issue tabard in his studio. Image: Gemma Day
While homeless, addicted to drugs and sleeping on a bench in a tube station, Worley found a release in graffiti. He and his friends would get their hands on some paint, tag walls or sneak into train depots and paint the side of tube carriages. The repetition of a tag scratched something inside, made him relax.
“The mad thing about being an active user, drug addict, is you never moan, you never complain, and you never go without. I never went without drugs and I never went without alcohol. By hook or by crook I fucking made that shit happen every day with no money,” he said.
“I did not know how to get out of that situation, all I knew was I had a mission every day, and that was to escape how I felt about life.”
But after getting clean, Worley didn’t know how he would support himself and his young family. What he had was a vague sense he could paint, and some transferable skills from his time on the street.
“I knew how to hustle, I knew how to graft, and I just took that same energy and just transferred it into a studio setting. I just worked the way I pursued trying to buy crack,” he said.
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Advertising helps fund Big Issue’s mission to end poverty
That involved painting, obsessively, 18 to 20 hours a day in the studio. As his success grew, though, he began to change. “I became obsessed about earning money and my ego kind of took over, and I got totally lost in where I was and who I was as a person,” Worley told me.
“There was no beginning or ending point between me and my work. It defined who I was as a person – I’d come home and just hate my family because I saw them as getting in my way of reaching my potential, and all this kind of stuff. It was just this really warped way of looking at the world. In reality, they’re the only people who give a fuck.”
Hard work, therapy and an intimidating morning routine brought him back to a more even keel – though he said his biggest issue remained “trying to manage my completely fucked mental health”.
As Worley showed me around his studio, I began to realise the art he’d been working on was not what I’d expected for a Big Issue collaboration. Bluntly, it was (slightly) sanitised versions of hentai, a Japanese form of cartoon porn. It didn’t quite feel like he should have taken a picture of my ID before he let me in, but it wasn’t far off. The final versions, it should be said, looked a bit different.
“If I said I want to do something with Big Issue, so we’re going to base it in homelessness, I think it would just be disingenuous and just shit,” he told me.
So there’s this direction instead. It came about through Worley’s collaboration with Slawn, and grew into a horror at the content mixed with a fascination for the craftsmanship.
Advertising helps fund Big Issue’s mission to end poverty
He added: “There’s some guy sitting there drawing that shit every day. I put myself in that situation. What’s going on in that guy’s life?”
The result is a new body of work aimed at breaking taboos. Which is what led to one of the more unexpected sentences of my interview from Worley: “I don’t think there’s anything really more taboo than hentai pornography.”
