Portrait Artist Forum - View Single Post - A No-lead Maroger medium?

04-28-2002, 03:20 PM

There is probably more uninformed opinion concerning the subject of megilp/Maroger than there is about the building of the pyramids. I am a partner in a firm devoted to introducing the finest examples of hard-to-find materials to serious artists. It is owned by a group of working artists who, over several decades, shared information and sources and did a lot of testing. Over the years, artists would drop by our studios for a cup of this or a tube of that and, eventually the idea dawned on us that there might be many more artists interested in getting the best glue or balsam or mediums. So we started a small business devoted to finding the best stuff available and splitting it into small quantities (just like we'd been doing amongst ourselves). It's worked out to be a good thing for all concerned.

A number of years ago I came to the realization that what was happening with artists materials involved a lot of chemistry, so I went back to school to study it. Man, what an eye-opener that was! Like most artists, I thought that mixing this oil with that resin was just a physical thing...that they were separate entities, eg. I thought that damar mixed with oil could later be dissolved if turpentine were applied to the dry surface of the painting. Was I ever wrong!

Making mediums is a complex thing and you simply cannot add a dollop of oil to alkyd or any other medium and expect it to not affect it on a profound chemical level. It became clear that most artists destroy their own paintings by treating medium-making as something to be indulged in lightly...like making a burger.

Years ago, I was an advocate of alkyds and thought they offered a number of advantages and few disadvantages. I believed the manufacturer's advertising copy. For some reason, the fact that Liquin was turning a deep red in the bottle did not register until it was too late.

Alkyds offer many advantages, but the advantages accrue to the manufacturers, not the painter. Linseed oil is like any other natural commodity, it is subject to wild market fluctuations. Mother Nature is notoriously unstable and if the gowing season is too short or too dry, the price of linseed oil skyrockets. On the other hand, the supply of phthalic anhydride and pentaerythritol are available in tank car lots from companies such as GE, PPG, Sherwin-Williams and Mil-Spec. Modify it with a cheap and readily available oil like soya or tobbaccoseed oil and suddenly the paint-making industry had changed.

For large commercial paint manufacturers (not artist's paints) alkyds were a godsend. The supply was stable and not ruled by two oil conglomerates (ADM and Cargill). It was much cheaper to produce and it did not involve all of that dangerous and tricky varnish making that oil-based paints required. Even better, that other tightly controlled conglomerate that makes turpentine, was cut out of the loop. Oil-modified alkyd was easily thinned with kerosene (sold under the rubric of 'mineral spirits' and -- to artists as Turpenoid and the other '-oids').

It was a great discovery for the paint manufacturers. It was cheaper...much cheaper. Okay, so the quality wasn't as good as the finish produced by well-made oil paints and varnishes, but the manufacturers no longer needed to hire those highly-paid varnish makers who had turned that tricky occupation into an art form. Now they could hire burger flippers to unload tank cars of the stuff, pour it into vats to make paint, and it was almost as good...well, that's a very big almost.

It was a while before, in preparation to being bought out by ComArt, W&N jumped on the alkyd bandwagon. It made them profitable and a attractive target for a merger. They mixed bentonite in with the alkyd and produce Liquin. Different additives made it into Oleopasto and WinGel. Still, it was all just the same old alkyd from the same tankcar, mixed with different stuff to make it handle differently. The profit margin was immense and, as a result W&N was able to phase out their difficult-to-make Double Mastic (an ingredient in Maroger's medium). Profits soared. Mergers went through. Stockholders were elated. But were artists happy? Sure. They didn't know enough to not be happy.

As a wag once said, you can get people to sit on a porcupine if you first exhibit it in a museum as a chair. The same can be said about artists and their materials. I speak from embarrassing experience when I say that the vast majority of us haven't the foggiest notion of what we're doing and even less about the materials we use and how they are made. Most artists use one medium throughout a painting. Perhaps that's an offshoot of believing that one size fits all, but it's a disaster to a painting. A good example is that old paintings do not show where glazes were applied whereas on most new paintings, glazes are glaringly obvious as being something different from the body of paint.

Over the years, I have gotten to know many of the people in tha art materials manufacturing industry. Some are exceptionally honest and dedicated. The management at Old Holland and Robert Doak are examples of this small, dedicated group. Many are cynical profiteers. Sadly, those are the guys who can hire the best copywriters and ad agencies to convince the average artist that their neo-rose madder is lovingly strained through Rhine maiden's hair.

People quote books like Ralph Mayer's book, which has by default become the bible. Among those chemists in the business, he ranges from a joke to dangerously opinionated. Estimates range from an error rate of 20% to more than 50%. On his way to establishing a reputation, Mayer had an axe to grind and set out to diminish the reputations of anyone else who wrote a column on art technique. He was determined to be the grand fromage in art writing and he succeeded. He was mercilous with rivals. This, and the equally fallacious De Mayerne are the sources most often quoted by well-meaning but woefully uninformed artists.

I have no doubt that the Gamblins are charming people. They certainly are good businessmen and have the intelligence to hire convincing public relations writers. They were able to parlay their connection with what has been called "America's Attic" (the Smithsonian Institute) into a belief that it is a bona fide art museum...in reality it's a collection of toys, electric chairs, pickled frogs, stuff from Barnum's museum, airplane parts and a small collection of paintings...much smaller than at a prep school gallery like Phillips Andover. The Barnum connection may be an indication of what it takes to be declared (by the copywriter) "America's foremost colorman." I guess Munsell and Birren are chopped liver.

What I object to most is basing one's sales on creating fear in the buyer. Whether it's fear of bacteria (must wash with this expensive anti-bacterial soap...you never know where that doorknob has been), or fear of traditional pigments (rather than learn how to handle them like sentient adults, just ban them), or destruction of the environment (the one that recovers from volcanic eruptions, like Mount Tinatubo, that darken the skies for years but will collapse under the weight or burning leaves).

A quick look at the politically correct pigment list shows that all of the "objectionable" pigments have been replaced with pigments that have one common thread going through them...they're cheaper! Before the scare about cadmiums, barium pigments were considereed to be distinctly second-rate and were used only in student grade paints by Utrecht. Rutile titanium oxide is one-third the cost of basic lead carbonate. It's also one-third as durable (that's why they use lead paint to paint the lines in highways...titanium stripes would be gone in a week). Titanium just sits like a dead lump in the oil, whereas lead changes the oil and makes it much stronger (remember it's a chemical change that happens).

Maroger's medium is very tricky to make. It's so tricky (and expensive) to make that some once-reliable French companies offer a tubed-up gel made with oil and lime. Basically, it's a soft soap and absolutely deadly to the paint. They proudly proclaim that it's lead free. Hey, it's the lead that makes oil strong and causes the chemical reaction.

Maroger's is made from two basic ingredients; black oil and double mastic. Double mastic is made from the very expensive ($200 per kilo) mastic tears dissolved in turpentine (another scary product that causes absolutely no documented harm). It must be made with twice as much mastic tears as is used in making the best single mastic varnish on the market ($157.20 per litre). It's not difficult to make, but expensive because there's a fair amount of waste (bugs and dirt in the tears) as well as a natural wax which must settle out over a month. Shepard's recipe ignores this and cooks bugs, dirt and wax right into the black oil. No wonder Maroger's has such a bad reputation.

It's the black oil that's difficult to get a handle on. The best is made with litharge (lead monoxide) not white lead. The best litharge is laboratory grade. The most common litharge is a by-product of silver smelting...use inferior materials, get inferior black oil. As with any cooked varnish, it's best to make it in big batches in order to control the temperature. Temperature is critical. It takes a while to get the experience to produce a black oil that's clear and not turbid. It then has to be aged to allow solids to settle out before being decanted. Add a month to the time.

The best way to make the gel is to mix it fresh rather than let it stay in the tube for months after the gelling reaction (remember the chemistry). Freshly gelled medium is reactive and forms molecular bonds with the paint that old tubed gel does not. In a recent convocation of restoration chemists held in Dublin, they concluded that any problems with megilp/Maroger's stemmed from (1) being chemically inactive when mixed into the paint and (2) incorrect proportions of oil to mastic. Too much oil and it was worse than useless.

My partners and I knew about those peoblems and formulated two separate ingredients, black oil and double mastic in precise proportion so that an equal amount of each resulted in the ideal jelly -- thixotropic, slippery and permanent.

Is it dangerous? You bet. If you feed enough black oil on sandwiches to a child, they will fall ill. How much do they have to eat? According to the doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital, the average three-year old has to eat a window sill full of lead paint for it to do profound damage. Where's Mom when the kid is eating the house? Blame the lead.

For adults, you have to take in a great deal of lead for it to begin to slow you down. Before that, you'll develop a real tummyache. That's called painter's colic. How does it get into your body? The dust can be breated in or get into the eyes. It can also be ingested. If you don't wash your hands before eating, you can get some mixed with your food. Depending on how much you munch in your snacks, it should take a number of years of daily eating lead before you get that tummy ache.

Still, the only way it can be called lethal is when the lead is propelled by a goodly charge of gunpowder. As a chemical in paint, it's just not that dangerous to a careful worker. I have at least a ton of the powder in the shop and my levels of lead are lower than most.

As Leopoldo said, cadmium is more of a problem for the health. Cadmium is used to make stainless steel cooking pots. Does it jump out of the stainless and into your food? I suppose that there are sensitive machines that might be able to pick it up, but the human body seems incapable of registering the effects. Another scary thing to prevent us from painting with any degree of joy.

So, what's easier to make and has a much higher profit margin. Mastic and black oil varnishes or alkyd straight from the tank car?

As a cynical marketer, how would you sell an inferior, but highly profitable item? Obviously it would not be on the basis of it being superior in any way. We could appeal to patriotism -- mastic is harvested on an island between Turkey and Greece whereas phthalic anhydride and pentaerythritol are made right here in the good old US of A. Keep American jobs at home!

Even stronger would be the traditional appeal to save the children, just think of the young lives ruined by munching on an expensive portrait or on a Rembrandt. As they say in the Ad-Biz, the kid scare has legs. Tie that in with the fear that advertisers have developed for everything from body odor to falling arches and we have a ready-made audience that is satisfied with doing its decision making based on what they hear on Oprah or read on the internet.

With that kind of market, we can then sell a Toyota Celica for an inflated price if we simply call it a NeoFerrari. Some people will convince themselves that it drives just like a Testa Rossa, even though they have no experience with a Ferrari, let alone driven one. Yeah, NeoFerrari. I like it. We can say how we went to Modena and were inspired to turn a rice burner into a manque prancing horse. Someone will buy it!

Use inferior materials, get inferior paintings. Make decisions based on ignorance or slick ad campaigns and you deserve the fate that befalls your paintings.

Learn. Study. Experiment. Test. It's your duty as an artist.

04-28-2002, 03:20 PM	#23
Roberts Howard Guest Posts: n/a	There is probably more uninformed opinion concerning the subject of megilp/Maroger than there is about the building of the pyramids. I am a partner in a firm devoted to introducing the finest examples of hard-to-find materials to serious artists. It is owned by a group of working artists who, over several decades, shared information and sources and did a lot of testing. Over the years, artists would drop by our studios for a cup of this or a tube of that and, eventually the idea dawned on us that there might be many more artists interested in getting the best glue or balsam or mediums. So we started a small business devoted to finding the best stuff available and splitting it into small quantities (just like we'd been doing amongst ourselves). It's worked out to be a good thing for all concerned. A number of years ago I came to the realization that what was happening with artists materials involved a lot of chemistry, so I went back to school to study it. Man, what an eye-opener that was! Like most artists, I thought that mixing this oil with that resin was just a physical thing...that they were separate entities, eg. I thought that damar mixed with oil could later be dissolved if turpentine were applied to the dry surface of the painting. Was I ever wrong! Making mediums is a complex thing and you simply cannot add a dollop of oil to alkyd or any other medium and expect it to not affect it on a profound chemical level. It became clear that most artists destroy their own paintings by treating medium-making as something to be indulged in lightly...like making a burger. Years ago, I was an advocate of alkyds and thought they offered a number of advantages and few disadvantages. I believed the manufacturer's advertising copy. For some reason, the fact that Liquin was turning a deep red in the bottle did not register until it was too late. Alkyds offer many advantages, but the advantages accrue to the manufacturers, not the painter. Linseed oil is like any other natural commodity, it is subject to wild market fluctuations. Mother Nature is notoriously unstable and if the gowing season is too short or too dry, the price of linseed oil skyrockets. On the other hand, the supply of phthalic anhydride and pentaerythritol are available in tank car lots from companies such as GE, PPG, Sherwin-Williams and Mil-Spec. Modify it with a cheap and readily available oil like soya or tobbaccoseed oil and suddenly the paint-making industry had changed. For large commercial paint manufacturers (not artist's paints) alkyds were a godsend. The supply was stable and not ruled by two oil conglomerates (ADM and Cargill). It was much cheaper to produce and it did not involve all of that dangerous and tricky varnish making that oil-based paints required. Even better, that other tightly controlled conglomerate that makes turpentine, was cut out of the loop. Oil-modified alkyd was easily thinned with kerosene (sold under the rubric of 'mineral spirits' and -- to artists as Turpenoid and the other '-oids'). It was a great discovery for the paint manufacturers. It was cheaper...much cheaper. Okay, so the quality wasn't as good as the finish produced by well-made oil paints and varnishes, but the manufacturers no longer needed to hire those highly-paid varnish makers who had turned that tricky occupation into an art form. Now they could hire burger flippers to unload tank cars of the stuff, pour it into vats to make paint, and it was almost as good...well, that's a very big almost. It was a while before, in preparation to being bought out by ComArt, W&N jumped on the alkyd bandwagon. It made them profitable and a attractive target for a merger. They mixed bentonite in with the alkyd and produce Liquin. Different additives made it into Oleopasto and WinGel. Still, it was all just the same old alkyd from the same tankcar, mixed with different stuff to make it handle differently. The profit margin was immense and, as a result W&N was able to phase out their difficult-to-make Double Mastic (an ingredient in Maroger's medium). Profits soared. Mergers went through. Stockholders were elated. But were artists happy? Sure. They didn't know enough to not be happy. As a wag once said, you can get people to sit on a porcupine if you first exhibit it in a museum as a chair. The same can be said about artists and their materials. I speak from embarrassing experience when I say that the vast majority of us haven't the foggiest notion of what we're doing and even less about the materials we use and how they are made. Most artists use one medium throughout a painting. Perhaps that's an offshoot of believing that one size fits all, but it's a disaster to a painting. A good example is that old paintings do not show where glazes were applied whereas on most new paintings, glazes are glaringly obvious as being something different from the body of paint. Over the years, I have gotten to know many of the people in tha art materials manufacturing industry. Some are exceptionally honest and dedicated. The management at Old Holland and Robert Doak are examples of this small, dedicated group. Many are cynical profiteers. Sadly, those are the guys who can hire the best copywriters and ad agencies to convince the average artist that their neo-rose madder is lovingly strained through Rhine maiden's hair. People quote books like Ralph Mayer's book, which has by default become the bible. Among those chemists in the business, he ranges from a joke to dangerously opinionated. Estimates range from an error rate of 20% to more than 50%. On his way to establishing a reputation, Mayer had an axe to grind and set out to diminish the reputations of anyone else who wrote a column on art technique. He was determined to be the grand fromage in art writing and he succeeded. He was mercilous with rivals. This, and the equally fallacious De Mayerne are the sources most often quoted by well-meaning but woefully uninformed artists. I have no doubt that the Gamblins are charming people. They certainly are good businessmen and have the intelligence to hire convincing public relations writers. They were able to parlay their connection with what has been called "America's Attic" (the Smithsonian Institute) into a belief that it is a bona fide art museum...in reality it's a collection of toys, electric chairs, pickled frogs, stuff from Barnum's museum, airplane parts and a small collection of paintings...much smaller than at a prep school gallery like Phillips Andover. The Barnum connection may be an indication of what it takes to be declared (by the copywriter) "America's foremost colorman." I guess Munsell and Birren are chopped liver. What I object to most is basing one's sales on creating fear in the buyer. Whether it's fear of bacteria (must wash with this expensive anti-bacterial soap...you never know where that doorknob has been), or fear of traditional pigments (rather than learn how to handle them like sentient adults, just ban them), or destruction of the environment (the one that recovers from volcanic eruptions, like Mount Tinatubo, that darken the skies for years but will collapse under the weight or burning leaves). A quick look at the politically correct pigment list shows that all of the "objectionable" pigments have been replaced with pigments that have one common thread going through them...they're cheaper! Before the scare about cadmiums, barium pigments were considereed to be distinctly second-rate and were used only in student grade paints by Utrecht. Rutile titanium oxide is one-third the cost of basic lead carbonate. It's also one-third as durable (that's why they use lead paint to paint the lines in highways...titanium stripes would be gone in a week). Titanium just sits like a dead lump in the oil, whereas lead changes the oil and makes it much stronger (remember it's a chemical change that happens). Maroger's medium is very tricky to make. It's so tricky (and expensive) to make that some once-reliable French companies offer a tubed-up gel made with oil and lime. Basically, it's a soft soap and absolutely deadly to the paint. They proudly proclaim that it's lead free. Hey, it's the lead that makes oil strong and causes the chemical reaction. Maroger's is made from two basic ingredients; black oil and double mastic. Double mastic is made from the very expensive ($200 per kilo) mastic tears dissolved in turpentine (another scary product that causes absolutely no documented harm). It must be made with twice as much mastic tears as is used in making the best single mastic varnish on the market ($157.20 per litre). It's not difficult to make, but expensive because there's a fair amount of waste (bugs and dirt in the tears) as well as a natural wax which must settle out over a month. Shepard's recipe ignores this and cooks bugs, dirt and wax right into the black oil. No wonder Maroger's has such a bad reputation. It's the black oil that's difficult to get a handle on. The best is made with litharge (lead monoxide) not white lead. The best litharge is laboratory grade. The most common litharge is a by-product of silver smelting...use inferior materials, get inferior black oil. As with any cooked varnish, it's best to make it in big batches in order to control the temperature. Temperature is critical. It takes a while to get the experience to produce a black oil that's clear and not turbid. It then has to be aged to allow solids to settle out before being decanted. Add a month to the time. The best way to make the gel is to mix it fresh rather than let it stay in the tube for months after the gelling reaction (remember the chemistry). Freshly gelled medium is reactive and forms molecular bonds with the paint that old tubed gel does not. In a recent convocation of restoration chemists held in Dublin, they concluded that any problems with megilp/Maroger's stemmed from (1) being chemically inactive when mixed into the paint and (2) incorrect proportions of oil to mastic. Too much oil and it was worse than useless. My partners and I knew about those peoblems and formulated two separate ingredients, black oil and double mastic in precise proportion so that an equal amount of each resulted in the ideal jelly -- thixotropic, slippery and permanent. Is it dangerous? You bet. If you feed enough black oil on sandwiches to a child, they will fall ill. How much do they have to eat? According to the doctors at Massachusetts General Hospital, the average three-year old has to eat a window sill full of lead paint for it to do profound damage. Where's Mom when the kid is eating the house? Blame the lead. For adults, you have to take in a great deal of lead for it to begin to slow you down. Before that, you'll develop a real tummyache. That's called painter's colic. How does it get into your body? The dust can be breated in or get into the eyes. It can also be ingested. If you don't wash your hands before eating, you can get some mixed with your food. Depending on how much you munch in your snacks, it should take a number of years of daily eating lead before you get that tummy ache. Still, the only way it can be called lethal is when the lead is propelled by a goodly charge of gunpowder. As a chemical in paint, it's just not that dangerous to a careful worker. I have at least a ton of the powder in the shop and my levels of lead are lower than most. As Leopoldo said, cadmium is more of a problem for the health. Cadmium is used to make stainless steel cooking pots. Does it jump out of the stainless and into your food? I suppose that there are sensitive machines that might be able to pick it up, but the human body seems incapable of registering the effects. Another scary thing to prevent us from painting with any degree of joy. So, what's easier to make and has a much higher profit margin. Mastic and black oil varnishes or alkyd straight from the tank car? As a cynical marketer, how would you sell an inferior, but highly profitable item? Obviously it would not be on the basis of it being superior in any way. We could appeal to patriotism -- mastic is harvested on an island between Turkey and Greece whereas phthalic anhydride and pentaerythritol are made right here in the good old US of A. Keep American jobs at home! Even stronger would be the traditional appeal to save the children, just think of the young lives ruined by munching on an expensive portrait or on a Rembrandt. As they say in the Ad-Biz, the kid scare has legs. Tie that in with the fear that advertisers have developed for everything from body odor to falling arches and we have a ready-made audience that is satisfied with doing its decision making based on what they hear on Oprah or read on the internet. With that kind of market, we can then sell a Toyota Celica for an inflated price if we simply call it a NeoFerrari. Some people will convince themselves that it drives just like a Testa Rossa, even though they have no experience with a Ferrari, let alone driven one. Yeah, NeoFerrari. I like it. We can say how we went to Modena and were inspired to turn a rice burner into a manque prancing horse. Someone will buy it! Use inferior materials, get inferior paintings. Make decisions based on ignorance or slick ad campaigns and you deserve the fate that befalls your paintings. Learn. Study. Experiment. Test. It's your duty as an artist.