Claudio Kirac: Doing creative things for a living
Claudio Kirac loves his home, the Gold Coast. He’s a Creative Director and artist and for twenty-plus-years he has played a major role in the evolution of his local arts and culture scene.
Words: Lila Theodoros
Muse: Claudio Kirac
Claudio Kirac’s studio is full of colour. Movement and expression explode out of the canvas he works on, but the subtle balance of tone and colour softens the work, projecting a vibrant optimism. This is Claudio Kirac on canvas.
Claudio grew up on the Gold Coast and always knew he was made for a creative life. From drawing cartoon cats as a kid to wanting to be an artist when he grew up, he was hooked on the arts. Working his way up from a junior designer at Billabong International to the position of Creative Director in his 15 years with the company, Claudio said yes to every opportunity and collected a diverse set of skills reaching across design, photography, film and illustration. He now runs his own multidisciplinary studio and, along with his team, is changing the face of his home town, the Gold Coast, one mural or brand or visual campaign at a time.
Claudio’s studio is a brightly-lit building in an industrial part of Mermaid Beach and also home to Art-Work, the creative agency he founded with his business partner Paul Bow around ten years ago.
Claudio has more than twenty years of incredible experience behind him and despite a career spent working with major brands involving international travel and glamourous fashion world experiences, he is full of fun and sans ego. He is a community builder, industry mentor and all-round super nice dude. And he loves his Gold Coast.
The ocean has always called to Claudio. Born in Queanbeyan, just outside of Canberra, he spent his early years counting down the days until his family’s next holiday, spent by the sea. His dad was a builder and progressively moved his family up the coast, from build to build. “Dad was a carpenter and we built all our houses,” Claudio says.
“We kept building and selling, and we kept moving. And he really liked it near the coast, so we moved up to Coffs Harbour, and then we ended up here on the Gold Coast, which was great because I loved the coast. In the early, early days when I was little, we used to go from Canberra to the south coast, so Batemans Bay, Tuross Heads, Mollymook, all those places. And ever since I was small, that was it. I was done. Pure high seas, water all over the joint, fish.”
Finally settling on the Gold Coast in 1985, Claudio was home.
A lot of us spend years searching for home, whether that is a place, a town, a community. But for a lucky few, they already know in their heart where that is. Claudio lives and breathes for his Gold Coast home and has been involved, consciously or not, in the evolution and growth of the local arts and culture scene. During the 80s and 90s, the Gold Coast had a very limited tourism aesthetic and now the local community boasts an incredible diversity of artists and creatives, relocating in droves. “There was a blank canvas here really, ready for a shift,” he says. “It’s always been a fairly creative town, but it’s had its stigma of Meter Maids and sunshine and golden beaches.”
In the early 2000s the underground arts scene in Australia was building momentum. Street art meets design meets music meets fashion.
“Semi-Permanent had just started. Banksy came to Sydney, with a massive arts show in an industrial warehouse. Design was pushing forward, working with street artists,” he remembers. Claudio was working at Billabong at the time and watching this creative movement evolve, not only on an international scene, but here in Australia too.
“In 2003 or so, a collective of four of us artists, Beau Velasco Parsons (RIP), Amber B, Christian Halford and myself, started Undergold. For me, it was something to do outside of working within commercial art and to keep pushing that underground art movement. We ended up doing our own art show, like in a bar in Main Beach, at Capital Bar, which was awesome. How did we get people there? I don’t even know how we got people there. It was with postcards, or something. I don’t know, man. But it was packed. There were over 100 people and it was huge, and then we got in the paper, and then featured in Black and White Magazine and Tokion Magazine in New York, like all this sort of stuff started pushing this movement. This was just our little collective, you know? Then around that, other collectives started up as well. We were really drumming up this underground energy which was awesome,” he says.
Through groups like Claudio’s Undergold Art Collective, the arts and culture scene on the Gold Coast continued to grow and shift perceptions away from visions of Meter Maids dressed in skimpy gold bikinis walking past tacky tourist traps, towards a new creative hub of artists, makers, designers, musicians and photographers, all inspiring, or being inspired by, their local community.
“I look back on Undergold as really, really exciting times. Super sparking joy when it comes to that because we really felt like we were making a change. We weren’t accountable for anything and we were really just having fun and nailing it, as well as making really good art,” he says.
This evolutionary creative wave was eventually embraced and supported by local government organisations. Through investment in the arts, grants and dedicated art spaces and venues, the local arts scene is thriving. Claudio says “It’s been amazing for people to come here, live and make work. It was really good to see when people actually started to make work in response to the Gold Coast; being here, telling a story and connecting with Indigenous cultures and other crew who have been here for generations. It’s fantastic, because it inspires me so much as well.”
Claudio is a designer, a photographer, a creative director, a painter, an illustrator, an early vector king. He loves to make art. From honing his visual skills early on with choice subjects like Ghostbusters, Star Wars, Gremlins, Indiana Jones and Garfield, Claudio was always making art. When it was major education decision time at the end of high school, he couldn’t fathom enrolling in a university when all he wanted to do was be an artist.
“I decided ‘I’m just going to go do art.’ And my teachers were like ‘You’re fucking nuts, mate. You need some further education.’ Even without a university degree behind me, I’ve just been able to keep working forward at my own pace and whether that’s held me back as I’ve gone through my career, I’m still not sure,” he says humbly.
The decisions you make at the time can rarely be seen as a whole for many years, but the path Claudio took, from starving artist to eventual design college graduate to junior entry-level job to an extensive tour of duty through every creative department of Billabong during his 15 years there, added up to an enviable set of diverse and mastered skills reaching across modalities, making him the creative he is today. Claudio worked hard and stayed true to his love – art.
The line between commercial design and art is blurry for many creatives and for Claudio it is not only blurry but zig-zaggy, tidal-wavey and criss-crossy. He has always been an artist but his joy in discovery and experimentation pulled him through commercial art practices. I ask Claudio how he walks these not so straight lines of creativity and he says with a laugh “I’ve always thought I sold out so long ago. And so be it. I don’t know. I don’t know if I get taken seriously as a contemporary artist, but I’ll keep doing it forever, which I absolutely love, so maybe when I’m 65 I’ll be taken seriously, who knows?”
“The design career helps, but it also hinders as well, in that I’m straddling both worlds – I’m not the starving artist, and I don’t want to be a starving artist. I’d rather be comfortable in my life and make money while I’m here, not while I’m dead. It’s hard living within that professional design world and then also in the contemporary art world. So yeah, it’s a constant line that I’m walking and figuring out as I’m going.”
Claudio in his studio, 2020
In addition to being an accomplished Creative Director and the creative driving force behind his acclaimed multidisciplinary studio Art-Work,
Claudio is a skilled painter who continues to make art and exhibits his contemporary work regularly. His work is layered, textured, vibrant and emotive – he is called to make it.
“I constantly keep making it – it’s that outlet and response, usually emotional responses with materials and colour, trying to build it up. I do a lot of portrait work on paper and then a lot of landscapes, which are large works on wood or canvas. But yeah, it’s constant. The work is emotional responses to what’s happening in the world, or within myself, and to our environment. This work is personal, primal, barbaric, all that sort of stuff.”
And his work is constant. Fuelled by a seemingly unending source of creative juice, Claudio keeps working. His art is prolific and a major part of his day – I get told about the “art zone” set up in his design studio, giving him access to his work whenever inspiration visits. He is a creative 24/7, with ideas in constant flow. He says “I wouldn’t have it any other way because it’s the best life. It really is. And life without art and culture, I can’t imagine it.”
Claudio’s work pulses with a vibrant and optimistic energy, a clear reflection of the person he is. He is a community builder, a joyful creative, a positive and supportive industry leader. I ask him for tips on how to generate that next big project and without pausing for even a second he says “Look at what tools are available to you now. Look at what platforms you can use to get your idea out there. Get together with like-minded people and keep the dream alive because there’s nothing better than talking. There doesn’t have to be outcomes, it’s just sharing ideas and what you’re going through.”
