Alison Seiffer, an illustrator whose editorial projects appeared in publications including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, and who designed the eye-catching posters for the annual Rell Sunn benefit surf contest in Montauk for 14 summers, died on May 17 of complications of pancreatic cancer. She was 64 and had been diagnosed only weeks earlier.
Her daughter, Anni Spacek, 23, twin sister, Dale Seiffer Oberlander, and her ex-husband, Peter Spacek, were with her at the time of her death.
Ms. Seiffer and her daughter were especially close. “She was a very devoted mother to Anni,” her sister said. “Anni was the love of her life and her purpose, to a degree. They had a really strong bond.”
“I kept no secrets from my her and we navigated my adolescence with a suspicious ease,” Ms. Spacek wrote. “She always made me feel understood and seen, even when I couldn’t see myself. . . . We fit in so much joy and wonder into our time together. Each day she shared a piece of wisdom with me, and I’m so thankful that my heart was wide open to it all.”
Ms. Seiffer and her identical twin were born in New York City on March 28, 1962, to Bertram Harold Seiffer and the former Alice Theodoro. She grew up in the city and spent summers at Roaring Brook Lake in the Hudson Valley and later in Portugal.
At Roaring Brook Lake, “when we weren’t on our bikes, we’d be under the lake’s surface for hours, eyes wide open looking for catfish, frogs, and other creatures. We were adventurous and scrappy and inseparable. We shared a world that was all ours,” Ms. Oberlander said.
Ms. Seiffer graduated from the Ethel Walker School in Connecticut. She discovered a love of art in her senior year and applied to the Parsons School of Design, where she studied illustration and earned a bachelor’s degree in fine art, spending time abroad in France and Italy.
She was always learning and never took shortcuts, her sister said. “She had a lot of integrity as an artist.” She was also very supportive of other artists.
“Her work as an editorial illustrator required she conceptualize the core message in a manuscript and translate it into a single, compelling image. That is not easy to do,” her sister said. “Like many truly gifted artists, she was never fully satisfied with her own work. No good artist ever is. She always kept striving, always pushing herself toward the next idea, the next improvement, the next challenge.”
In addition to the newspapers mentioned above, Ms. Seiffer did editorial illustrations for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, BusinessWeek, Glamour, Popular Science, and Time magazine, and commercial projects for Levi’s, Godiva, and the United Nations.
In 1995 she and Mr. Spacek, also an artist, moved to Montauk, where they bought a house in Ditch Plain. They were married in September 1996. They shared an enthusiasm for the outdoors and the water, and fished together here and in the Bahamas, Easter Island, and Alaska.
The organizers of the Rell Sunn contest approached Ms. Seiffer about designing a poster for the fund-raiser in 2014. That same year she established MTK Poster, an art-print studio that featured her own work highlighting the places and culture of the East End. The vibrant prints included images of clammers, surfers, paddleboarders, anglers, and local scenery. “She loved the physical environment that inspired all of her poster work,” her daughter said. She designed the Rell Sunn posters every year until 2025.
Though they divorced in 2007, Ms. Seiffer and Mr. Spacek remained friends. They each eventually moved to Springs.
In the kitchen, sticky toffee pudding and raspberry tarts were her specialties, and “she could do anything with chicken,” her sister said. She made beach plum jam every fall from fruit she picked herself.
“In life she could tackle anything. Whether it was installing a new faucet, epoxying kitchen countertops, or laying tile, she just did it,” her sister said. “I honestly don’t know where she got the nerve. She approached life with this mixture of creativity, determination, and bravery that I admired so much.”
In addition to her sister, who lives in Rye, N.Y., her daughter, who lives in Springs, and Mr. Spacek, Ms. Seiffer is survived by two nephews, William and Bertram Oberlander of Brooklyn. A brother, Bertram H. Seiffer Jr., died before her.
A memorial was held yesterday at the Art Center at Duck Creek in Springs. Her family has suggested donations to the National Pancreatic Cancer Foundation at npcf.us.
