Cartoon Hero

Julian Opie, a complicated man who makes deceptively simple works of art, is showing me around his Old Street studio. ‘This is Diane von Furstenberg,’ he says, pointing to a splendid likeness of the fashion designer, 10ft tall and sporting, of course, a wrap dress, picked out with pin-sharp detail; her face, however, is no more than a bubble. ‘And this is Felicia, she’s married to a banker,’ he continues. Felicia is also bubble-headed and clad in evening dress and jewels, standing beside a neoclassical column. Another wealthy woman,Ika, looks on blankly from across the studio, elegantly posed in her best clothes, her head a cryptic white circle. ‘It costs £25,000 to be my model for the day,’ he explains. Now my face also resembles a shocked white bubble. ‘And then you can buy whatever work comes out of that day for the usual price — about £45,000 for a work this size.’

Well, I suppose it isn’t much more than Van Dyck charged in his day. You can see why the super-rich want to sit for him. At 53, he makes work that’s instantly recognisable; groovy yet establishment. He trained at Goldsmiths under Michael Craig-Martin, where the YBAs hatched five years later; he’s forever associated with Brit Pop after he painted Blur as a Warholian quad for their Best Of album; he’s owned by the Tate and the National Portrait Gallery and MoMA in New York; he’s commissioned to make public art all over the world and collected by loaded local councils and the City of London — his sculptures of Caterina Dancing Naked leap in the shadow of the Gherkin. His smooth, idealised likenesses are somehow of their time; very Noughties. He would have done a wonderful Teflon Tony.

He makes people look ‘their best’. ‘Why not? I certainly set about trying to make people look their best because I want the picture to look good.’ But doesn’t that mean that his portraits have nothing to say about age and experience? No soul? He smiles wryly. ‘You could do a promo and say, “I can knock at least five to ten years off anyone.” ’ The oligarchs’ wives will be queuing up. It’s probably better than sitting for the Chapman brothers and getting a penis for a nose.

In person, Opie has no sharp edges — his voice is classless, his face blankly handsome. I’m not sure I’d recognise him if I saw him again. He’s personable, enthusiastic and seems fulfilled. This could be because of Aniela, whom he married recently; they have a six-year-old son, Paul, and she models for him ‘for hours on end’ — the result being several uxorious life-size sculptures of her posing with a towel, inspired by Aphrodite. He talks happily about their home life with his three other children, Elena, 19, Imi, 16, and Padmini, nine, as well as their cats, Gainsborough and Reynolds, and a guinea pig Aniela gave him for Valentine’s Day, called Humphrey.

But what’s this in his attic? He shows me upstairs into a high-ceilinged room above his studio where he keeps his treasures: a late Egyptian funerary mask, a framed, prominent black and white photograph of his late mother, and paintings by the 17th- and 18th-century mid-ranking masters Cornelius Johnson and John Vanderbank, purchased from the dealer Philip Mould. ‘I can’t afford Van Dycks, but these are my… amusements.’ There’s also a wall of cartoon smut. ‘These are pornographic 1980s Manga images,’ he says. If they once excited him, they don’t appear to any more. ‘They’re here because there’s nowhere else to put them — school kids come round everywhere else. But you can see how the shading on these faces has informed the way I do shading in my work.’ With disquieting detachment, he gestures to a pair of heaving breasts with a nipple ring, and starts talking, deadpan, about the technique, the shadows…

He once went around London checking out pole dancers only because he wanted to draw a figure in motion that was ‘dynamic’, of course. There was also work such as This Is Kiera, in which Kiera amounted to nothing more than the outline of two pert buttocks. But that phase is long gone. Being happily married has calmed him. ‘I don’t hang out with anyone except my family, really. I’ve never understood parties. Far too noisy and you end up feeling bloated. I don’t get it.’

Opie grew up in Oxford, exploring the Ashmolean and staring at the outsize heads in front of the Sheldonian Theatre. From the age of 11 he drew ‘every day, after school’. Making art became ‘like a diary, a way of dealing with the world. Otherwise I feel you’re locked here, behind your eyes.’ Opie’s father taught economics at New College and was ‘a big socialist. When I wanted to go to art school, he threw a fit, but Mum supported me.’ She was an artist herself in her spare time, and had always wanted to go to art school. Luckily, Julian’s elder brother went into politics, becoming a trades unionist: ‘so that satisfied my dad and in a way it was my mum’s turn. My father was not a rich man by any means, not good at making investments. He worried about how I’d make a living but in the end it was OK, I’ve never struggled.’

He’s modest — he’s been a great success. It’s ironic, perhaps, that the son of ‘a devout socialist, who had mixed feelings about bankers’ should be so popular with plutocrats, so at home with the commercial side of being an artist. He recently designed a window display for Hermès in Sydney, for example; he has a prestigious solo show about to open at the Lisson Gallery, and he has also set up a Julian Opie shop online, selling everything from old exhibition invitations to mugs. ‘I haven’t opened a web shop just to be egalitarian — that would be patronising. I do it for fun and because there are some things I want to try out. I’m certainly not snooty.’

Opie’s work has always aspired to the simplicity of a lavatory sign. An early dream was to represent a person with the instant economy of a motorway sign, ‘recognisable at 80 miles an hour’. ‘Ten years ago I went and bought a male and female lavatory sign, and super-imposed pictures of people I knew over it. I was imagining what it would be like to produce a lavatory sign for every single individual, not just men and women. And then I started doing that for faces… A logo for everyone in the world.’But some people won’t be turned into Julian Opies. ‘I tend to find people with good bone structure and simple hair. It’s about what you can deal with. I couldn’t deal with freckles for a long time. They were too small for the system I was working with. Then there was a time I was working with a system that could deal with freckles, or at least, moles… Maybe one day I’ll be able to deal with complicated hair,’ he says wistfully.

‘Bland’ is a recurring critical put-down. Opie’s images of Bryan Adams in rock-star poses, accompanied at the show by speakers playing his guitar riffs, caused this paper’s critic, Nick Hackworth, to exclaim, ‘Despair! The mundane apocalypse is at hand.’ ‘I’m always amazed by how much resistance I get,’ Opie says ruefully. Does he feel persecuted? ‘Sometimes. You put so much effort into an exhibition, it’s not like you’re forcing anyone to go to it — and you get such a hard time!’