While stationed in Monterey, California he wrote a script based on O. Henry’s story "The Gift of the Magi" that was performed by the Presidio Players in 1966 under the direction of Edward Bach.

Zuchman moved up to a small farmhouse in Walden, Vermont that year to pursue an MA in painting at Goddard College,[9] where he studied with James Gahagan.

[7] Philip Zuchman spent the final decades of his life living in West Philadelphia with his wife, painter Deborah Gross-Zuchman.

The couple restored their 19th century home and studio and occasionally held arts and culture events there up until the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic in 2020.

[11] In 2019, the Puffin Foundation awarded Philip a grant for “Lamentations,” a handmade book dedicated to people, past and present, who have suffered from migration, displacement, and exile.

"Artists work to expose the nature of existence, to communicate feelings, to activate consciousness, increase human knowledge, to promote justice, and education.

They are activists and pioneers who struggle in their lives against forces of isolation, poverty, discrimination, bad legislation, and being misunderstood by the public," he wrote in his "Call to Action.

And how nature forms its own endless variety of twigs, pebbles, leaves and grasses is now replaced by Philip’s wide range of textured application of paint.

Smears, glazes, washes, impastos, scumbles, blotches and the like build an uneven surface of the painting making the whole pulsate, again, like the shimmering of the light on any portion of nature’s beauty.