Using stand oil and chalk when oil painting

keora (11/7/2015)

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Mix oil paints with stand oil and powdered chalk to get a viscous consistency and more translucency, (He says both Velazquez and Rembrandt used this technique)

Somebody here ought to be able to verify the techniques they used.

Mix at what point? Do you want to make your own paint - in which case chalk will certainly affect the consistency, and can be used as a filler or stabilizer; I fail to see how it would affect the translucency and it certainly won't do anything for the colour - or are we talking about using powdered chalk as a medium with the stand oil? And how much? Chalk is inert, and absorbent. It shouldn't do any harm, but I'd not go any farther than that. Did Velazquez and Rembrandt use it - well, possibly, but again, at what stage? Do we really know how they made their paint (which they would have done, mixing the basic pigment with oils and resins)? I think a better approach here would be to try various brands of paint until you find one which works for you - I'm not especially convinced by the majority of artists who think they know more than the paint manufacturers - and citing Rembrandt and Velazquez isn't overly helpful: they were using different products, made in their own studios, with substances whose secrets they guarded; they used a stack lead white - and quite how they made that will have varied between them. I take it McClure has experimented for a long time and with many paintings - unless we're prepared to do the same, and to suffer the occasional disaster along the way, I should have a care about what I mixed with paint someone else has made, in which a variety of ingredients has been employed. Possibly he makes his own paint - some do (the link provided tells us nothing about him, but I'll see what I can find out about his practice later on today): that's very different from adding medium to the paint you buy - and I would be very cautious about adding anything other than solvent or oil to paint I hadn't made myself. If you've bought Michael Harding oil paint, for instance, it seems a bit arrogant to assume it needs chalk in it - but of course, you could ask him. Chalk has been used in various ways with paints and priming in the past, but then so have many other things - litharge, copal varnish, bitumen, ground up mummies, crushed insects, cows' urine, soot .... chalk is nowhere near as bad as those things can be, but the point still stands: just because Rembandt used it (and assuming he really did) doesn't mean that I'm going to be able to get his results by doing the same. Why pray in aid a couple of old masters whose practice and substances they used were a whole world away from what we have available today? Why apply a 17th century method to 21st century paint?

http://www.naturalpigments.com/art-supply-education/oil-painting-impasto/ This may interest you, dealing with the use by Rembrandt and Velazquez of chalk to help build up impasto.

I agree with you that if you're planning on finishing a paint in a day - or even in a week - this technique (basically, to bulk up oil paint to achieve very thick impasto effects) is likely to be overkill. Rembrandt could paint quickly, we're told, but would generally have built up a painting over a much longer time, leaving layers to dry before glazing over them. If a layer of impasto was not pure paint, it would probably have dried more quickly - especially if using lead white: this may have been one reason for employing chalk, although Rembrandt did sometimes use impasto so thick you could have taken hold of it and lifted the canvas .... there are painters who use very thick paint even today, and it would be interesting to know what, if any, thickening agents they use. Stand oil - it shouldn't take that long to dry, especially if cut with turps. I make my own and don't have problems with very long drying periods - if this is a problem, try using an alkyd resin medium like Liquin instead; I'm playing about with mediums a bit at the moment, limited only by finance because as you suggest, you can buy a number of substances (take a look at Rublev paint and the Natural Pigments blog; I don't think all of it can be obtained in the UK, and I don't know if you could import it either). There are also some interesting mediums on Michael Harding's website - I don't think he has one intended for impasto, but it's been a while since I looked and perhaps he has. On the whole, I believe in keeping painting simple and mediums even simpler - paintings have been ruined by injudicious attempts to make paint do things it was never intended to do: but this is a very interesting field and it seems to me that every painter has to find his or her own way - because as well as there being a lot of different mediums, the most important variable element is the human one: it's what we DO with all these weird and sometimes wonderful things that makes the real difference - bearing in mind that it's sometimes a good idea to take a look, say "how interesting", and then .... walk away. Theories abound of course: you referred earlier to McClure advising "use more paint"; many years ago, I met the artist Victor Voysey - he never tutored me, unfortunately, but one of his portrait studies adorned the art shop in which I worked some 40 years ago - and he counselled the use of very THIN paint, at least at one stage in his career. I suspect that giving advice on technique is never really going to work - we use what works for us and there's only one way to find out what that is going to be.