We were lucky to catch up with October Sharify recently and have shared our conversation below.

October, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Do you wish you had waited to pursue your creative career or do you wish you had started sooner?

I started exhibiting work in earnest in 2021 when I moved to Chicago, and I felt super behind in life compared to my peers. It was my first apartment out on my own, let alone my first big move. I think when I was younger I had a constant internal tug to accomplish bigger and better, but creative work can be so transient and spontaneous, things had to happen the way they did. For me the main ingredient was changing up my environment and circumstances, which was a drastic change (new city, new market, new peers) but I don’t know how things would have kicked off for me otherwise. Now that I know taking the leap would eventually work out, I have a side of myself that does wish I would have gotten out there sooner, but when I think about my earlier years as an artist I don’t think I would have had the courage, the confidence in my work, or even the sense of responsibility. So I think it’s totally okay to let things build up over time- especially your confidence, I can think of a million times where I tried something new and got nervous or I failed and that halted my progress. I think anything that is worth anything is worth the careful and sometimes slow accumulation of resilience that it takes to be successful. My mom went back and got her first degree in her 40’s after an almost 20 year break from college. I was and I am so proud of her that now I know that it’s never too late for anything, and thinking about things that way takes the pressure off in a huge way.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am an oil painter and sculptor based in Chicago, and I create surreal, chromatic, and at times visceral figurative paintings. I have a fairly traditional oil painting background but in 2023 I started experimenting with integrating sculpture into my work by using materials like clay and lace and textiles. I use a limited palette for all my works, so all of my works lie somewhere on the color spectrum from red to blue. I deal a lot with spiritual and technological imagery, and my academic background is in history and theology. I have an African American and Persian cultural background which is incredibly pertinent to my work and what I choose to explore.
I think what I am proud of and what’s been exciting me the most in my work is making myself uncomfortable, pushing my own boundaries and being more vulnerable in my work than I ever have. I can be quite a rigid and reserved person when it comes to my ideologies and how I present myself to the world, and the work as of late has been me really trying to get to the bottom of some reservations and insecurities that I have about myself as a person and a thinker. I believe that what has been coming out of my studio recently has been super fun and audacious, something I’d never considered making before.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

I think for artists it can be really hard to say what the end goal is, especially if your practice is an endlessly forming discipline that you hone over time. On the practical side I would love it if my career allowed me a sense of financial freedom and provided opportunities to do things like travel and work with institutions! I think that can be a given for a lot of people, and I want that in addition to never having to compromise on a vision or principle to achieve that. On a more personal level, what would be most fulfilling to me is having a huge breadth of work that tells the story of my ideology. Being in my 20’s I think I’ve only just started to scrape a good layer of a philosophy I have been trying to get at my whole life, and I can only hope to be working long enough to get everything off my chest and into the world. I eventually want my practice to span many different mediums, but I know I will always consider myself a painter at heart. A lot of my creative heroes are actually writers, musicians and philosophers, and I think all of these mediums are really integral to the making and exploration of visual art- and I aspire through my medium to participate in these important conversations in my own way.

Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?

A studio practice, and I would say most studio practices, can be extremely isolating, and when I was a younger artist I assumed that everything had to be extremely insular and self made. I would try to do everything myself and not truly participate in any sort of exchange with my peers- which ended up being super limiting. I think one of the greatest resources as an early career artist is your community and your peers. As my desire to participate and succeed in the artist community grows, so does my desire to engage with my fellow artists and the people around me. I think we all tend to underestimate how much the people in our lives want to see us succeed or even just participate in something fun and different. I’ve been saved so much trouble and heartache due to the help and generosity of my friends, and if I’d done certain things under my own power I don’t things would have worked out nearly as well. The same goes for intellectual exchange and criticism. I have always been pretty sensitive to criticism and while I do think you do not have to bend to the request of any person you meet, I have often been surprised by just how helpful it’s been to see things from even just one more person’s perspective. I think we see the success of great contemporary artists and we assume it is always a one man show, when in reality a lot of them have teams, assistants, partners, and peers pushing them forward.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://instagram.com/impolgy