Alyson Petruncio: the uncanny hidden inside the familiar
Alyson Petruncio, who works under the name jellopencil., is a Virginia-based artist whose practice centres on coloured pencil drawings that transform ordinary American environments into unsettling, dreamlike spaces. Born in 1993, Petruncio originally studied biology and bioinformatics and began drawing regularly in 2018, initially producing commissioned portraits before gradually moving towards a much more personal and surreal language. Her work today draws extensively from Americana, suburban imagery and the visual memory of childhood, deliberately pushing familiar situations towards something stranger.
The work shown here immediately captures what makes Petruncio's practice compelling. At first glance, there is something almost nostalgic in the dense vegetation, the muted domestic landscape and the intensely tactile surface of the coloured pencil. Yet the human figures interrupt that familiarity: bodies seem to merge with their surroundings, faces become distorted and the scene acquires an almost biological quality. There is no need for a dramatic narrative; the discomfort comes from the impossibility of fully understanding what we are looking at.
This is perhaps the most interesting aspect of Petruncio's work. She does not rely on horror in an obvious sense, but on the gradual corruption of the familiar. Her images can initially appear almost playful or nostalgic, only to become increasingly disturbing the longer they are observed. Petruncio herself describes an interest in the moment when something recognisable begins to feel “wrong”, while her work has also been discussed in relation to childhood unease, suburban anxiety and the psychological tension hidden beneath apparently harmonious environments.
What makes the drawings particularly effective is the contradiction between technique and subject. Coloured pencil traditionally suggests intimacy, delicacy and even childhood, whereas Petruncio uses that softness to construct images that feel psychologically unstable. The result is a practice that sits somewhere between memory, nightmare and Americana: beautiful enough to invite you closer, but strange enough to make you question why you wanted to look in the first place.
Alyson Petruncio (b. 1993) is a contemporary surrealist artist born and based in Virginia, USA. She uses colored pencil as a primary medium to create incremental fragments of an uncanny visual universe. Her compositions often include imposing figures, indecipherable expressions, suburban imagery, dramatic lighting, and clashing color. One of her goals is to parallel the ominous elements of American pleasantries with first-glance benign visuals that gradually give way to subtly skewed and morphed elements.
While her educational and work background is in biological sciences, specifically bioinformatics and cellular biology, she has exhibited in a couple group shows, with the most recent being Neural Backup in Brooklyn, NY, and been featured in Divide Magazine, C-DeSac Magazine, and It's Nice That, a global creative platform.
