Shame
-Lio White, 2025
This is a painting I did that represents my struggle with food and beauty culture. It’s a common problem to have and translate into art, but I wanted to attempt my own take on representing this issue artistically. I have myself sitting at a table with several organs served, meant to represent how every food health video on social media nowadays either tells you how good something is for certain parts of your body, or how it harms them. I have a class of stomach acid to represent my acid reflux, and my eyes gouged out and floating above me to represent how when you aren’t skinny, you always feel like the world is staring and judging you for eating anything, no matter how healthy or unhealthy it is. The eyes also represent how I view myself. Whenever I receive complements on my appearance, it’s almost always for my eyes, and not having them anymore would leave me with only what I struggle to like about myself. This is an acrylic painting done on a 16 x 20 canvas.