"Magilphs and Mysteries"*

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

Venice J.M.W. Turner

Whether to use a medium with oil paints is an individual decision. When we polled some of our favorite artists to ask them if they used medium and if so, which one, the answer was very mixed. There are reasons for choosing one medium over another, if using medium at all—to slow or speed drying time, to add translucency, to add or reduce gloss. See: When we need to add flow and some transparency to our pigments, we tend to use Neo Megilp gel (Gamblin). The name is a mouthful, but broken down reveals an interesting history.

“Neo”, of course, means “new”, and Neo Megilp is a contemporary version of Negilp or Maroger, a medium first used in the 1700s. It was sometimes called “Majellup” perhaps a mash-up of the words “mastic” and “jelly”. The original recipe was a mixture of mastic resin and linseed oil with other varied formulas over the decades. Its golden quality was seen as an asset adding a buttery tone to canvases. I…