In her Naples Art District studio, Tammra Sigler traces her red crayon markings across an old work as Lou Reed’s deadpan lyrics, which inspired the piece, fill the room. After more than six decades in the fine art world, the trained figurative artist—with works in the permanent collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art and The National Museum of Women in the Arts—has honed the art of thinking and creating abstractly. “I’m interested in colors that kind of irritate each other,” she says as we walk past two of her framed monotypes—prints created by pressing a painted or inked plate to paper.
Tammra’s confident mark-making and sophisticated sense of composition shine through as she deliberately breaks from representation. Within the frames, erratic grease crayon markings dance across the papers with childlike whimsy; swirling colors punctuate the visual, and smudged lines form perfect squares. Her skill reveals order among the chaos: Vertical brown dashes draw the eye to a central focal point, while bright green scribbles enclose the scene. Fire engine red streaks blaze through the center, adding contrast.
The scribbles capture how she sees the world. When looking at a chair by the window, Tammra sees not shade and light but an amalgamation of shapes and colors in the sunlight spilling across the wood.
The 81-year-old artist relishes the accidental paint splatters and the errant pieces of slightly off-color tape in her mixed-media works. She points to a splash of red near a 2-inch strip of baby blue tape on Sheltering So it is (2020), created during the pandemic. “Anything that happened down here was accidental,” she says. “You have to have the eye to say, ‘It’s gorgeous.’”
Dana Roes’ FT #6 (2021), photographed by Brian Tietz
Dana Roes’ FT #6 (2021)
Former Florida SouthWestern State College art professor Dana Roes once spent 12 months on a solo creative retreat in Iceland on a Fulbright Scholarship. She compares abstract art to poetry: One must read before writing, and write plainly before composing poetry—just as artists master traditional techniques before breaking from them.
When viewers first encounter abstract art, the absence of recognizable subjects can be jarring. Take Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915)—the stark black square set against a white background symbolized a radical break from traditional representational art. The Russian artist developed suprematism, a movement advocating for the reign of pure feeling over subject matter or narrative in visual art. He sought to liberate art from the “weight of the real world” to focus on the emotional and perceptual impact of color, line and shape.
Former Florida SouthWestern State College art professor Dana Roes likens great abstraction to a well-written poem. “You start off reading great literature before you dive into writing poetry,” the University of Pennsylvania graduate with a master’s in fine arts says. “First, you make linear, sensible sentences. Then, you dismantle and deconstruct them, and you find poetry. Abstraction, for me, was the same. I understood the representational form, and then I broke it down into a language that makes sense to me.”
The path to abstraction evolved through artists who progressively challenged representation: Van Gogh’s emotionally charged brushwork in The Starry Night, Matisse’s deliberate distortion of form and color in his Fauvist works, and Picasso’s analytical deconstruction of space in early Cubism. Within modern art, the true dawn of the genre remains debated, but most art historians point to three modern pioneers: Russian Wassily Kandinsky (who proudly claimed the title for himself), Swedish painter Hilma af Klint and American abstractionist Arthur Dove.
Photography by Brian Tietz
Photography by Kelly Jones
Photography by Brian Tietz
Richard Diedrich’s Gold Sky, Wedge Shore (2020), photographed by Louis Venne
Richard Diedrich’s Gold Sky, Wedge Shore (2020)
Their spirit of artistic liberation forms a throughline to abstract expressionism. In the 1940s, artists like Jackson Pollock developed a distinctly American approach to nonrepresentational art, characterized by spontaneous creation and emotional intensity. Pollock’s frenzied drip paintings embodied post-war trauma and tilted the genre further into the realm of extremes. Dana says the genius of the artist’s work lies in the context in which it was created. “It wasn’t an arbitrary act; it was the total internalization of World War II,” she notes. The unprecedented violence and technological advancement of the era compelled abstract expressionists to break convention and develop new ways to capture a transformed world: Pollock’s meticulous paint pouring; Rothko’s luminous, floating color fields; de Kooning’s aggressive, distorted figures.
But even within radical approaches, classical principles—color theory, movement, composition, texture—remain central. “When you stand in front of a Pollock, it is like an environment to your left and right,” Dana says. “It swallows you in this kind of Rococo-encrusted filigree, layers of paint that are nothing shy of ornate when you’re up close, and then you have all the depth of color and value.”
Contemporary artists continue to build on their predecessors’ foundations while developing distinct vocabularies. Naples architect and painter Richard Diedrich’s series Man on the Edge follows the pioneering work of Helen Frankenthaler. The maven colorist’s 1952 Mountains and Sea presented a new soak-stain method involving pouring diluted paint directly onto the canvas for a looser application. Richard explores a more saturated take, using watercolors and water-based inks to evoke the flow of water by pouring paint and tilting the canvas or spraying diluted ink across the surface for a rippled effect.
Anna Rac's Golden Reflections (2021)/Brian Tietz
Anna Rac's Golden Reflections (2021)/Brian Tietz
Instead of brushstrokes, Richard builds his compositions through layers of poured paint. Occasionally, he uses painter’s tape or rubber cement, applied between pours and removed at the end, to reveal pops of color—subtle nods that mimic the cadence of a coastline or the union of land and sky. “Originally, I was painting very realistic landscapes with mountains, cottages and the boathouse,” he says about his early days creating at his North Georgia lake house, where he became enthralled by the intersection of water and land. “Then, I started eliminating things so that I had nothing but the land and the water, and it became more and more abstract.”
Richard, who studied art and architecture at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, lets the materials speak for themselves. Like with his architectural blueprints, he plans his compositions and color palettes in advance—whether capturing a sun-soaked horizon or the feeling of being underwater. But as the painting progresses, he surrenders to the process. “When you pour successively, the watercolor picks up the earlier [layers]. You don’t really know what you’re going to get,” he says. “I’d literally get up in the middle of the night and go see what happened. When the painting really works—you get a natural high.”
Balancing honed technique with abandonment lies at the heart of the genre. Classically trained pianist and painter Anna Rac submits to her craft with repetitive mark-making set to classical music. The Naples-based artist’s brush flits across paper and canvas, responding to softer melodies with slopes and curls and harsh crescendos with angular marks that punctuate the canvas like musical notations. A work influenced by Shostakovich—the Soviet composer known for his intense symphonies—yields abrupt, almost quarrelsome brushstrokes, while a Baroque composition from Vivaldi or Bach inspires gentler linework that trickles across the canvas in soft, aquatic tones. The ephemerality of a melody—heard, felt and lost in an instant—takes form on Anna’s sprawling sheets of paper in a mastery of ambiguity that, with a bit of context, harkens to universally understood emotion.
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Photography by Brian Tietz
anna rac abstract artist
Naples Arts District (NAD) artist Anna Rac’s repetitious compositions translate classical music into visual form. The pianist-turned-painter’s marks dance across the canvas, responding to everything from Bach’s gentle melodies to Shostakovich’s intense crescendos and revealing emotions too abstract to capture in words.
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Work in progress from Anna Rac’s Sounds series (2021), photographed by Brian Tietz
Anna Rac’s Sounds series (2021),
Back in Tammra’s studio, the Syracuse University- and Maryland Institute College of Art-trained artist is still tapping along to the track that inspired her Lou Reed Small Town Advice. Named after the 1990 Andy Warhol tribute song by The Velvet Underground frontman and John Cale, the monotype is one of several dozen she’s created while listening to music that moves her. The piece is among the first of what she calls her “dirty prints,” a break from traditional printmaking’s emphasis on precision. She plays the song on repeat, each mark dancing to the beat.
Two years ago, Tammra started toying with more structured forms in her Blocks series, inspired by memories of her firstborn daughter. The colorful squares stack and collapse into one another like toys on a child’s bedroom floor. “What is the first thing that we do? We stack, we build—which is a metaphor for what we do through our whole lives,” Tammra muses.
Heavy brushstrokes, evocative colors and inspired forms reveal emotion and intention in interpretive works. For her 2017 series, Threshold Revisited, Dana memorialized the final moments she shared with her mother with oil on canvas. The thick, intertwining ropes—loosely mirroring the knots she brushed from her mother’s hair before she passed—echo the artist’s pain. “I like the mysteries that come in the unknown,” Dana says. “When things become concretized, you’re spoon-feeding your audience.”
In abstraction, these personal moments transform into universal experiences, inviting viewers to find their meaning in the undefined spaces between representation and emotion.
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Tammra Sigler’s Blocks and Clouds (2024)
Tammra Sigler’s Blocks and Clouds (2024)
Tammra Sigler’s dynamic canvases showcase her figurative art background through deconstructed familiar forms evoking contemplative concepts. The Blocks series parallels her daughter’s toy blocks with the human drive to build.
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Lou Reed Small Town Advice (2008)
Lou Reed Small Town Advice (2008)
Like fellow NAD creator Anna Rac, Tammra—whose works are held in the permanent collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art and The National Museum of Women in the Arts—often channels songs in her work. In Lou Reed Small Town Advice, the markings and smudges dance to the beat of the rocker’s 1990 tribute to Andy Warhol.
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Richard Diedrich’s After Georgia (2020), photographed by Louis Venne
Richard Diedrich’s After Georgia (2020)
A former architect, Richard Diedrich’s realistic watercolor landscapes evolved into abstract creations, where poured pigments echo naturalist themes—from a sunset horizon to the feeling of being underwater.
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