‘Anti-Diet Cake’

‘Anti-Diet Cake’, 2024

Claudine of  Claudine Castro Studio

Acrylic, Gouache, and Acrylic Gel on Canvas – 10″ x 10″

This piece of art is a blend between painting and sculpture through the thick, purposely shaped paint on the canvas.

After working with hundreds of personal training clients, I realized that in order to create a better relationship with food, we have to find ways to healthily cope with our stress.

I recently discovered that I was able to relieve my food obsession and unhealthy eating patterns through painting. It sounds kind of counterintuitive, but painting and sculpting through paint and using food as my subject allows me to healthily cope with that food obsession.

I’m also able to blatantly communicate through the words “anti-diet” that food is just food. I’m against diet culture because it perpetuates unhealthy eating habits and destroys our relationship with ourselves and others. When we release the idea that food is good or bad, and we instead view it as a neutral source of energizing our bodies, we can ease our thinking around food.

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!