Joan Witek has used the color black in her paintings, drawings and prints for several decades: striving in her paintings for what she calls a black impressionism. In optical terms, the light-absorbing black paint and the light-reflecting canvas gives the canvas a kind of dazzle.

Entirely black objects are rare in the natural world and black can have powerful overtones. Although it could be said that it is a formal color, she has wanted to use it to make an expressive, intimate picture with an aura of mystery and presence.

As Lilly Wei has described her work: “Witek plays oppositions endlessly; black is both ascetic and alluring, Appollonian and Dionysian, meditative and expressive, flawless and flawed, fierce and demure… a distinctive unequivocal presence, yet subtle, elusive.”