Joan Witek: Exploring the Language of Absence Joan Witek (b.1943) has been probing the complexities, meanings, and infinite variety of the color black for her entire artistic life. While appearing to be simple and easily grasped there is an ongoing language of proportion and meaning in this resolve to abstraction. Black is usually considered the absence of color: it is severe, rigorous, associated with death, or depression or repression. But as Lilly Wei has written: *Witek plays these oppositions in her work: black being ascetic and alluring, meditative and expressive, flawless and flawed,…