‘3 Tier Strawberry Shortcake with Fluffy Whipped Cream’

‘3 Tier Strawberry Shortcake with Fluffy Whipped Cream’, 2024

Claudine of  Claudine Castro Studio

Acrylic, Gouache, and Acrylic Gel on Canvas – 14″ diameter

This piece of art is a blend between painting and sculpture – I highly encourage you to touch this piece. You can feel the mounds of the ‘whipped cream’ and seeds of the strawberries carefully placed onto the painted cake layers on the canvas.

I went to Japan for the first time in January 2024 – the trip was life changing! Everything that the Japanese created seemed so well thought out and curated, from the robust transportation system, to the food, all the way down to the little trinkets they sell in memorabilia shops.

I’ve been told before that I like to rush in life and my art, and for the first time, I wanted to put so much care and love into these food-inspired pieces.

Each strawberry was carefully crafted and took over a day to dry. I wanted to create a sense of magic with the purples in the background. Before I piped on the thick paint as whipped cream on the canvas, the 3 slices of cake were floating on top of each other, as if they were happily hanging out in a different universe.

Claudine is Filipina American living in Orange County, CA who, for over 27 years, has been creating pieces ranging from live sketches to acrylic paintings on canvas. She always felt compelled to create, from a toddler drawing on walls in her home in Manila, to an adult, painting murals in Costa Rica.

As her work as an artist evolved over the years, Claudine realized that art can come in different forms and is not limited to technical, rigid practices that she learned in formal education. The pressure of creating art in traditional forms slowly dissipated. Claudine found that creating intuitive, minimalistic paintings from nature & passersby is enough to convey joy and gratitude for the simple things!