An artist who used to be homeless has turned down a six figure contract with a top London gallery to sustain the healing creativity of his art, instead of working with a financially-focused mindset.
Edward Worley, 32, spent years living on the streets after he was kicked out of home while working at his dad’s art gallery.
From that moment, his life turned into Groundhog Day, where sheer willpower drove him to find cocaine and alcohol for daily consumption on an endless cycle of insanity.
Reflecting on his cocaine addiction, Ed explained: “You can’t focus on something for more than a millisecond. Not being able to work out what’s real and not real. What I lived in was absolute chaos of repeating the same action over and over again.
“I had no thoughts of the future, I thought I would be dead at 25.
“I got broken down to just basically being a shell of a human being.”
He described how he was then able to rebuild himself into the person he wanted to be for his family and for himself and is now a professional artist under the name OPAKE.
Through the process of turning his life around, at times substituting the drugs he took with ten litres of sparkling water, Ed has since resolved relations with his family and now has a family of his own, with two sons aged one and six.
The star that guided him through to the other side of this darkness was art, including his work with cyclical-shaped boards.
The creative healing he discovered in his artwork became an outlet for the powerful, unstoppable force in his brain that fuelled his addictive past, allowing him to feed that addiction by doing something positive and creative.
Ed said: “Although it was horrendous to live through that chaos, now that I don’t have that in my life I replicate it in my artwork.
“Everything is about recreating that kind of psychosis, that madness I went through.
“I had no idea what was going on from a day to day basis, so the circles on the boards are like the spirals of what my mental state was, and how that spiral can be very hard to get out of.”
His story is written into his artwork, where art is the tool that helped him process the years of trauma he endured.
Ed hopes his work reveals the mental suffering that people can go through.
He added: “For a long time I was really ashamed of what my story was, and I didn’t tell anyone about it for a long time.
“Then, I realised that by telling that narrative it helps me as a person and it gives people a level of understanding even just for a second to think about what mental state some people are going through right now.
“The issue for me wasn’t drugs and alcohol, the issue is my brain, so by waking up being disciplined, I paint and do that day in day out seven days a week, and that allows me to hyper focus.
“The process for me is more important than the outcome.”
Ed’s artwork is therefore deeply personal as it has been the substitute for the drugs he was previously addicted to in the lifestyle he was entrapped in, and this was why he turned down the six figure contract with one of London’s top art galleries.
Rather than recognising the importance of Ed’s story in his artwork, they dismissed it saying ‘I’m glad you’re over that now’, meaning Ed tore up the contract and left, to instead sign with Quantus Gallery, who will be hosting his first solo exhibition from 20 October, where some of his artworks will be auctioned off for homeless charities.
While Ed explained that it can still be a battle for him to maintain focus in his new way of life, he has found that streamlining the power of his mind into an artistic discipline has been his saving grace.
Having overcome eight years of suffering, Ed can see everything he has learnt through this experience.
He added: “I think it took me years to work out how to play the hand that I was dealt. I tried to play it the wrong way for years and years, now I’m at a stage in my life where I’ve worked out how to play those cards.
“I think it’s about navigating my own mental health and doing that on a day to day basis through creativity.”
Feature Image: copyright to OPAKE
