Theme Thursday - White

I once had rather an eccentric art teacher.
A Romanian woman, with a fabulous accent, and amazing lace up boots, dark, long hair- she looked rather like a gypsy stroke vampire.
She took over from our original art teacher while she was away, and what frustrated us all to begin with, was her absolute abhorrence of us using white and black in our paintings.
She was, classically trained, I suppose you'd say, and had learned from artists in Romania for years.
She specialised in the human form, and her artwork was amazing.
She showed us a pencil drawing that had taken her five or six hours, and the photo of the girl that she was drawing. It was amazing. I wish I had a copy I could put up, it honestly looked just like the little girl.
Anyway, she told us that if we wanted to make black, we did just that, we'd make it. And then she'd proceed to mix all the primary colours and voila she'd have a perfect black.
She said that white and black (in particular) just flattened the other colours in our paintings, made them look dull.
No one really liked listening to this rule.
White was more accepted, though I did see her point that it could dull the colours out.

It was funny then, that last year when we all had to use our own direction for our end of year panels, how we all commented warmly on how irritating the rule had been, yet myself and others all mixed our other paints to make our blacks.