In December, College junior Allison Zuckerman won the Penn Publications Cooperative’s award for the best artwork in a student publication for this painting, titled “Please, Oh Please, Stop Throwing Those Uppercuts!” which originally appeared in The Penn Review literary magazine. She is also the recipient of a grant from the provost’s office supporting an exhibition in Williams Café of five of her large-scale paintings, which she plans to donate to the University.
I usually just stick to paint, but I wanted to do a painting inspired by comics. So I clipped a bunch of comic strips from a book I found—kind of an archive of comics from around the 1950s—and laid those down on the surface of the canvas and began painting over it, working from some sketches of a model. … I wanted to show action and emotion. I do a lot of portraits, a lot of exaggerated close-ups of people. So I wanted to capture that emotion, but also use humor. I feel like the spit came out pretty well. I think it’s a playful piece. It looks pained, but also styled and graphic looking, so it’s not too serious or realistic.
