The Ancient and Modern in Fluorescent Oil Paint

However, fluorescent colours in paint are relatively new. Synthetic fluorescence paint was brought to us in 1940s by brothers Bob and Joe Switzer. At 19 years old Bob, who was pre-med, had an accident at a factory which left him with seizures, damaged memory and double vision. Dreams of becoming a doctor faded as he spent time recovering in the dark basement room of the family house. Also spending time in the basement was Joe, his younger brother, who was an amateur stage magician and needed darkness to test his tricks, which would often encompass dark stages with white objects ‘floating’. Joe was now experimenting with UV light for his tricks and together the brothers made a UV lamp in the basement. On taking this to their father’s drugstore, they found that one of the bottle’s chemically stained labels seems to glow in the dark, and so they set off to investigate which chemicals could create such a glowing effect.  

They first discovered how to make fluorescence paints which although faded in sunlight, worked well when activated in the dark by UV lights. This would prove successful in Joe’s stage magic where performers could create the illusion of floating objects (think black costumes with fluorescence images painted on them dancing on a black stage under UV light). The Switzer brothers would go on to invent fluorescence paints that also glowed in daylight without the aid of UV lights (akin to luminesce) and called their business ‘DayGlo’ with colours such as ‘fire orange’, ‘Rocket Red’, ‘Saturn Yellow’, ‘Signal Green’, and ‘Ultra Violet’. Day-Glo paints had many uses, such as visibility signalling and markings, toys and advertising and became popular in the 1960s in the arts, where psychedelic imagery would grace record covers lending an extra-sensory quality, glowing or reflecting in ways that other pigments couldn’t. Fluorescent paints were popular with artists including Andy Warhol who used clashing colours like purple and green together (see also the short documentary ‘Andy Warhol, Fluorescent’ directed by Carla Duarte, 2017). In the 1980s fluorescent colours were everywhere; in fashion with aerobic wear and accessories, street wear, in the graphic design patterns that adorned many a teenager’s bedroom walls, and in the UV light posters that were pinned on top.   

On the other hand, oil paint embodies a traditional quality, an age-old, timelessness, that harks back to 7th Century Asia when oil paint was first found to be used in Afghanistan, and skips across centuries and continents to the Renaissance, when Jan van Eyck employed oil paints in his seminal painting ‘The Arnolfini Portrait’ (oil on oak, 1434, now in the National Gallery, London). Our collective cultural eyes see oil paint as a material that is embedded in time with a lengthy and rich history in conversation with pigments and image making. Its materiality too, holds an identifiable register, a language or a medium that carries its own ancient history, implicit and embodied.  

Oil paints are essentially ground pigments suspended in linseed oil. For those who are not familiar, oil paints take longer to dry than acrylic paint, watercolours or gouache. Some painters prefer this quality as it allows them to blend and rework areas without the paint drying before they have satisfied their image. Here there are quiet poetics in the slow drying time or the passing of time as part of oil paint’s inherent material values, that are in contrast with the speed of visual affront that fluorescence persuades. 

Today this meeting of opposites exists in a new range of Winton fluorescent oil paints by Winsor & Newton. When we think about fluorescence and oil paint together, a new proposition is posed. In 2022, the pop band Erasure released the album ‘Day-Glo (Based on a True Story)’; a follow-up to their 2020 album ‘The Neon’ to which songwriter Andy Bell said “I love the effect of an old stone wall with a neon sign on it. To me, that always looks like the clashing of antiquity and modern-day." 

Dr Karen David, 2025