Hollis Sigler
She had early success with a series of photo realist paintings that depicted underwater swimmers[3] but by 1976, in a gesture meant to repudiate what she considered a male-dominated style, she abandoned realism entirely in favor of a faux-naïve approach.
[3] Sigler's mature artistic style was faux-naïve, featuring paintings whose subjects, furniture, and clothing set in doll-house type interiors and suburban landscapes were stand-ins for the implicitly female figure.
Her faux-naïve style remained the same; the bright-colored illustrations framed by her script seem to be pleasant, but looking up close to the paintings, there are houses ablaze, angels ascending to heaven, things that reflected her life experience living with cancer.
[5] Sigler's paintings from the 1970s reflect the prominence of Chicago Imagist figuration, which influenced by Expressionism, Surrealism, Pop Art, and California Funk.
Sigler incorporated the facts she had learned about breast cancer, as well as a range of emotions from women experience diagnosis, treatment, surgery, and recovery, into her art.
[5] Many works in this series had been shown in exhibits across the country, and some reproductions have been hung on numerous hospital walls through a program sponsored by the Society for the Arts in Healthcare.
[9] After her cancer diagnosis, Sigler produced a series of five vitreograph prints in the fall of 1985 at Littleton Studios in North Carolina, as the first art works dealing with her illness.
The prints titled When Choice isn't Possible, Forever Unobtainable, Needing to Make a Change, She still Dreams of Flying, and There is Healing to be Done, introduced a darker side to the artist's woman-oriented works.
In a review of the 1993 exhibition "The Breast Cancer Journal: Walking with the Ghosts of my Grandmothers" at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, journalist Lee Fleming wrote of the content of one painting in particular:[12] The glorious Nike of Samothrace, "Winged Victory," stands in armless profile atop a shallow fiery-hued tumulus not unlike a breast.
A description from the National Museum of Women in the Arts notes that: the upper two thirds of the canvas pay homage to Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night.
At the center of the picture, bathed in celestial light the silhouetted "Lady" rises effortlessly along a fluted staircase, changing color from purple through rose to white as her arms slowly lift upward to become an angel's wings.
