Color & Paper: Claudia Borfiga

Sep 23

Sep 23 Color & Paper: Claudia Borfiga

Artist Profile, Santa Barbara, Print Issue

By Grace Miles

With rich color and lush patterning, the screenprint designs of California-based artist Claudia Borfiga offer instant delight. A self-described teaching artist, Borfiga was raised in the suburbs of London, where a degree in textile design led to four years teaching and working with Print Club London. Her relocation to Southern California was a change both daunting and exciting, as the colors and light of this sunbaked, coastal landscape presented a striking contrast to the dense greens of South England. Yet, the novelty of this environment was itself an invitation – one that offered Borfiga a new direction for her art. Soon, she began to feel “less afraid, and more curious.”

Colors, lightness and landscape emerge as the vital elements of Borfiga’s designs, and many draw their inspiration from California’s wealth of natural wonders. Cactus Terrazzo, with its sampling of multicolored cacti laid against staircase walls of tile and adobe, is intended to resemble the landscaped cacti gardens that have increasingly come to replace grassy lawns in Southern California. Meanwhile, the sweet pinks and greens of Cactus Garden comprise a scene modeled after the sprawling cactus garden at Montecito’s Lotusland. Incorporating nature and wildlife, two western fence lizards crouch among clusters of low cacti in Lizard Play, where the speckled white ground appears to pulse and flow beneath their splayed fingers.

*Claudia Borfiga, Cactus Garden, detail, screen print on paper*

*Claudia Borfiga, Lizard Play, screen print on paper*

Certainly, just as impressive as her print designs is Borfiga’s continued commitment towards using art and other creative mediums to engage with Santa Barbara’s local communities. In 2018, she launched Print Power, a socially-driven group of printmakers whose first project partnered with the Santa Barbara Rape Crisis Center and the Santa Barbara Arts Collaborative to offer free printmaking workshops to individuals affected by sexual violence. These workshops sought to provide a space for finding support and community, and to inspire creative expression among attendees. Borfiga has also contributed to Girls Rock Santa Barbara, a nonprofit that aims to empower girls with self-confidence through music education and the creative arts. She helped the girls design unique logos for the bands they formed at a Girls Rock summer camp, and guided the process of transferring these designs onto T-shirts worn for their end-of-camp concerts.

In 2019, Borfiga accepted an offer to become a Desert Fellow at the Blue Sky Center, a rural development nonprofit located along the northern edge of Santa Barbara County in Cuyama. There, she hosted various workshops for residents, including a series specifically for the students of Cuyama School District. Borfiga’s workshops encouraged participants to find inspiration for designs and patterns within the landscape around them – on the puckered spines of a cactus pad, the shadows cast by the ridges of a metal shipping container, a tangle of bright wildflowers – a creative decision intended so that residents might “look at something old and familiar through a new lens,” and gain a deeper appreciation for the things immediately accessible to them.

*Claudia Borfiga, Jungle Cow, screen print on paper*

More recently, Borfiga co-designed a proposal for Paseo Nuevo’s Earth Day Mural alongside artist and designer Adriana Arriaga. Their design was selected by a panel of judges as the winning entry and was unveiled on the exterior wall of the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara on the final day of the 2021 virtual Earth Day festival. Spanning a remarkable sixty feet, the mural is divided into twelve blocks of vivid color depicting plants, animals and other features endemic to the landscape of Santa Barbara.

Across the mural, California’s natural character pops in emblematic coastal desert imagery, such as bright orange California poppies, a brown-specked ear of corn and the endangered Arroyo toad. Under the growing threat of climate change, Borfiga wanted their design to remind people of “the privilege of living on Earth and enjoying its bounty” as well as the duties we owe the land in return for this privilege.

While screenprinting is often given little recognition in the art world, dismissed as perhaps too “easy” or reproducible, its accessibility is one of the very aspects Borfiga finds most wonderful about it. Screenprinting becomes a valuable tool with which she can teach and engage, while simultaneously sustaining her own creative passions. As Santa Barbara County transitions out of quarantine, Borfiga hopes to continue the efforts of Print Power, and use the creative joys of screenprinting to inspire stronger, more mindful communities.