Should we ban black?

I use a very limited amount of black in oils to achieve shades of different hues but never would consider black in watercolour. If I want real darks in watercolour I use a mix of Raw Umber and French Ultramarine, which seems to work well and can be varied. It's surely a matter of personal preference and style as it would be tragic if we all painted to set of rules and turned out formulaic results.

You can use black to mix greens as Will Kemp will tell you https://landscapeartblog.wordpress.com/2013/02/27/how-to-mix-landscape-greens-art-tuition-video-no-83/ You can avoid buying black by mixing it from other colours too https://landscapeartblog.wordpress.com/2013/03/20/how-to-mix-warm-and-cool-tones-of-black-art-tuition-video-no-90/

As old as the hills, this question - and it has divided opinion for centuries. The Impressionists argued about it - I forget the two involved, one might have been Renoir*, but while artist A said never use black, it kills your colour, artist B said he couldn't paint without it (this was in oil). I have black, but the sheer age of some of my tubes, and their pristine condition, suggests I use hardly any. Normally, I don't have a use for it - I mix darks with Ultramarine and Burnt Sienna or Burnt Umber (or Raw); and much prefer them, or other darks - eg, Pthalo Blue and Cadmium Red. Hilder used black, of course, and Paynes Grey, and Neutral Tint - and said he couldn't paint without the last of these. I've seen Shirley Trevena mix a black with Viridian, to make a marvellous smoky green.... the thing is, I think, that you need a great deal of skill to employ it successfully: and if you haven't got that, the results of using black can be dire - it can kill surrounding colours, it can reduce mixtures to a brownish sludge, and it's generally too intense and negative a colour to represent anything natural - very little in nature, if anything, is actually jet-black (even jet). In watercolour, I would suggest it be used with extreme caution and after much practice - in oil and acrylic, it can sometimes be useful, but has a tendency to leach into other colours in oil (and dries agonizingly slowly, and not always satisfactorily). But I'd never ban it - obviously... And it has its place in abstract work - possibly more so than in figurative painting: see Mondrian, and Rothko. And Pollock. *Wasn't it Renoir who described black as "the Queen of colours"? Well perhaps it is, but my advice is, never use it in skies, and don't paint your stone walls or boulders with a grey mixed from black and white - it looks ghastly, and you can tell at a glance that the b & w mix has been used.

Black used on its own can be ghastly, black should rarely if ever be used to lower tonal values, as we all know, a complementary color should be used instead, however used in mixtures with the yellows it does gives some very useful subdued greens and so should not be ignored. For black and greys other mixtures as already stated are much better, french ultra + raw umber for one example gives a rich unobtrusive black, a touch of red makes even richer.