Siena's work has won over critics, academics, and collectors alike. In nominating him for the Eissner award, Cornell art department chair Patricia Phillips called him "one of the most inventive, independent, focused, and prolific artists working today." In the Times, critic Ken Johnson wrote, "The recipes for spiraling lines, nesting boxes, recursively proliferating lattices, and other sorts of all-over patterns produce something far from soberly rationalistic. Mr. Siena's hand imparts to the images the wobbly linearity of underground comic book art; his decorative impulses give them an elaborately detailed, jewel-like quality…. The combination of systematic complexity, comically eccentric style, and hedonism is mesmerizing and irresistibly delightful."
'I never resented the fact that I made a living by other means. That's the way it is for most artists.'For his works on aluminum, Siena uses industrial paint—actually, sign painter's enamel. It's the other end of the spectrum from his student days, when he bought pigments in New York and ground his own paints, sometimes adding other elements like eggshells. Then, as now, he worked in a variety of media; he even dabbled in a kind of automotive objet trouvé: "Ithaca has harsh winters that are very hard on cars, and in the Seventies people probably didn't take as good care of their vehicles as they do now," he recalls. "There was a lot of metal in the street that had fallen off cars. And I was picking it up and painting it—these beautiful, lacy, intricately shaped, rusted pieces of metal."
Siena grew up in Washington, D.C., and Palo Alto, California; his father was a lawyer who worked at the Pentagon and later was legal adviser to the president of Stanford. On the Hill, he majored in art and had a varied undergrad experience, from serving as an unofficial roadie for his then-girlfriend's band to working his way up from usher to head house manager at Cornell Cinema. "I remember stealing apples," Siena says with a smile. "We used to ride our bikes to the Cornell Orchard and fill up our backpacks and make huge quantities of applesauce and eat it for the whole fall and freeze it." His academic memories include taking two astronomy courses: one taught by Carl Sagan ("the easiest class I ever took") and another by a professor who had transitioned from male to female over the previous summer. "It was the toughest class a lot of us had taken," he recalls. "Maybe she thought gender reassignment was hard enough— if she could go through that, then we could go through introductory astrophysics and stellar gerontology. I barely passed; it was the most hard-earned D that I ever got."