What If Your Nervous System Speaks In Color

What Colors Heal Your Energy? How Does Green Heal the Heart?  How to Create a Healing Home with Color? Color Psychology for Women? Chakra Colors and Emotional Wellness? 

A visionary painting called 'The Crossing' begins to answer today's most pressing questions about color, energy, and healing. Dorothy Fagan's conversational storytelling opens a portal for creative energy.

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A sunrise throws a moving lattice of shadow across eight blank canvases, and instead of planning, we follow the light. That single choice opens a door into intuitive painting, where willow charcoal becomes an emotional “EKG” and a bold wash of Indian yellow feels like confidence rising through the body. As blues and violets slice through the surface, the abstract marks suddenly resolve into a river crossing and a lone tree, and the painting starts speaking back like a mirror for the inner landscape.

From there, we pull the thread into color theory and perception, from Joseph Albers’s famous experiments to the way adjacent hues can change what you think you’re seeing. We talk about color as energy in motion, the felt sense of earth colors and sky colors, and why greens at the heart aren’t one perfect shade but a living spectrum. If you’ve ever stood in front of a painting and felt something you couldn’t explain, we name what might be happening in your nervous system and your intuitive senses.

We also get real about how a palette can change after trauma, when words fail and the body still needs release. That’s where Dorothy Fagan's Splash Scribble™ method comes in: a deceptively simple creative practice that pairs color and line until the flow naturally stops, signaling a moment of peace. If you’re curious about art therapy, trauma-informed creativity, nervous system regulation, and color alchemy, this conversation offers both meaning and a concrete place to start. 

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Dorothy Fagan, The Color Alchemist

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Color Alchemy happens in the body - to regulate your nervous system, create sanctuary, and restore creative energy.

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Transcript

Morning Light Sparks A Painting

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I was in the studio on a quiet Sunday morning. I had eight 30-inch square paint canvases aligned in a grid on the wall of the studio. And I was sipping my coffee. And the there were blank canvases. And I was just sort of like doing Sunday morning. And the the sunrise was coming up on the east side. So my studio is three walls of windows. It's a 30-foot sunroom that overlooks my pond. And you'll hear me talk about my pond. The sunlight was coming in those eastern windows and casting a light and shadow of the trees across my canvases. And I looked at that sh configuration of light and shadow pattern on the canvas, and I just like heard the suggestion in my knowing that I should use this composition, that I should draw this. And I I laughed out loud. And and I thought immediately, well, why not? What can hurt? So I grabbed a big cigar-sized stick of willow charcoal. And willow charcoal is one of my favorite drawing tools. Because willow charcoal is simply that charred willow branches. It's not like the compressed charcoal that you would buy in the art supply store. And if I tear into it with deep emotion or rage or vehemence or wanting to say something important, it makes a dark, expressive line. And then if I pull back all of a sudden, the line changes. So it's it's it's like an it will deliver an EKG of my emotional heartbeat in every single precious moment. So I grabbed this. If you have a thick branch or a thin branch or a twig, so I have a variety of those sizes on my drawing table, and I have one that's about the size of a cigar. So I grabbed that big one, and I ran my arm. Now, these canvases are so picture five feet tall. There's eight canvases, but together they're five feet tall and ten feet wide. So I'm standing in front of it, and my whole body, my whole arm is drawing this line. And as I I mean, even as I'm speaking, my arm is moving. It comes from my body. And I I drew that charcoal across the where the light and shadow pattern was on the on the canvas. Now, you know how quickly the sun moves. So the the leaves and the trees were like twinkling on the canvas, and and they were starting to move across the canvas. So I was moving quickly with that light, and I scratched through a kind of a horizontal diagonal that stroked down through all uh of the lower four pieces, and then some very strong verticals. There was one vertical tree on the right hand side, and so I stroked it really deeply. And then I stepped back and I thought, oh, okay. Ultimately, I I I began to see the to feel the color. I want to say I felt the color. Um I didn't have a word for it at the time I felt it, but I knew that it was gonna be runny. And if I and I knew that I didn't want it running on the wall, so I took all of the canvases off the wall and I placed them on the floor. Okay, so now the the five by eight foot multi-canvas grid is on the floor and I'm standing over it, and now I'm starting to mix color. So what color? I began seeing this vibrant yellow. So I was using Gamblin's Indian yellow, which is a translucent yellow, and when you mix it with um oil medium, it takes on this really deep resonance that you can feel in the solar plexus. It it feels golden and uh like self-confidence, and you can feel it pushing up under your heart, like pushing up, like rising. And I like to use this color underneath my paintings because it peaks out and it and it upslift the energy of the paintings. So I was thinking, if there was any thought going on at all at the moment, which there probably wasn't a whole lot of it, but it felt like underpainting. And so I took a big wide brush, maybe a four-inch brush, and loaded that paint on and put the put the yellow in, and I use a flat brush. So the calligraphy of the flat brush, if you think about the if I'm stroking with my body, my whole arm is making the stroke. It's not the energy is coming from my heart and my chest, not my head. So the energy, the creative energy is coming directly from the impulses of the heart down the arm. There's no detour to go into the head and start thinking about whether this is right or wrong or good or bad or any of that. It's an intuitive pulse of energy. So when we think about um emotion, emotion is energy in motion. And what I'm doing in this moment, as I'm describing that, is translating this raw creative energy into motion. The body is in motion, and those that colorful light from the solar plexus is moving in my body as I'm pushing this on canvas. And as you are imagining this, it is moving it inside of you. So there's some physical execution involved here. So I'm squatting and then I'm stroking, and then I'm mixing paint, and then we're stroking some more, and squatting some more, and standing up, so we could it's it's become very physical. And as the as the yellow made its way out onto the canvas, I began to sense the deep sky blues and purples. And so I mixed them up, and those cut through the lower diagonal section of the uh canvases. So we're cutting across all four canvases with the with the turquoise blues and some purples, and then that deep violet purple went on that vertical stroke where the tree shadow had been. Smaller um pieces of charcoal, the urge to draw with these smaller pieces of charcoal like si like an extension of my signature where it's it becomes automatic writing. I'm not thinking about what I'm what I'm trying, I'm not trying to draw something, I'm just letting the uh the EKG spell itself out across the canvas. Okay, and it's and it's making little hash marks and things, and

Seeing A River In Abstraction

SPEAKER_00 10:12

when I stepped back, I was immediately startled to see um a river crossing. So the blue turquoise in the in the lower portion became a river in my in my mind's eye. It's like recognizing myself as as the river, and then the one single tree standing upright represented the entire woodlands of my landscape here around my studio garden. And after journaling for so many years, the woodlands immediately represent the woods of life, like not the not the not the not the trees in the forest, but the woods that I have have lost myself in, the things that I would do if I could, or if I would, or all of those woods. And and it immediately just laughed at the serendipitous whimsical nature of what the creatrix is saying to me by giving me this painting. So you can hear that painting has become an exploration of what's inside myself, and this is way different than where I began painting. So let's go back to when I very start first started working with

Color Theory And Creative Experiments

SPEAKER_00 12:07

color in art school. I studied the color theory, Joseph Albers, that a color looks different depending on what's next to it. So the juxtapositions of color matter if we put a green square in the center of a canvas and we surround it with red, it looks different than if we surround it with gray. Now you have to look up Joseph Albers and read his color experiments. They're all color color plates, if you will, and you can see an experiment with how your perception of color changes. So this was the foundation of my experimental color. After art school, I beg I became a color experimenter and a creativity experimenter. So every project that I did, whether it was a personal painting or whether it was a project that I was doing for a client, I had a whole career of designing for companies and nonprofits in hospitals and the like. But every project was an experiment in the creative process. So how could I trigger the flow of inspiration to deliver whatever it was I needed in the moment? And that was on top of whatever personal emotions might be contained within my own spirit. So that's a lot of that's a lot of management going on. So let's see. Um if we say that

Chakras Color Fields And Perception

SPEAKER_00 14:26

the color, the color resides within us, the energy is within us, and the light is within us, and that the um the chakra energy centers can be represented by different wavelengths of color light. We could also say that the colors below the heart, the lower half of the body, are earth colors: red, orange, yellow. Now, there's different types of vibrancy. Many people think of earth colors as only the more subdued earth colors. Um, but I would say that the lower half of the body represents earth, and the upper half of the body represents the sky colors, the blue, the indigo, the violet. The heart is a full spectrum of greens, not just one perfect green, but many greens. So if we were to juxtapose colors above the heart with colors below the heart, and put them, imagine a pointalist canvas where all the colors are created with small dots of color side by side. And when you step back across away from the canvas, across 30 feet across the room, those colors juxtaposed blend in your mind's eye. And so you have mixed them, and there's a vibration happening, uh, a yellow just below the heart and a turquoise blue above the heart, but your nervous system is sensing the green, the blended color, and it's not just as a static green, it's an active green. It has a resonance and vibration to it that moves. So when you engage with art, when you look at a painting that a human has created, you are engaging with those energetic color fields, and your your um intuitive senses are able to feel, your ability to feel these colors is activated. You could say it's through your mind's eye and your optics and and that, but it it also goes deeper than that because we perceive with more senses than just our physical senses. We perceive with spirit and we perceive with emotion, and we embody what we perceive. So okay, I'm looking at a note here that says gritty earth ton paper. Let's jump, that was getting a little too ethereal, so let's jump back to the grit. Let's jump back to the cave paintings. Prehistoric

Cave Paintings And Earth Pigments

SPEAKER_00 18:04

cave artists stood in the cave and used raw earth pigments, blood stained blood, blueberries, charcoal, um raw umber, uh sand, clay, um, iron oxide to stain the walls. What did they use? Did they have a paintbrush? I don't think so. It would be the it would it would mix the color with some water, liquid form, stain the wall, put it on with the hand, use maybe uh an animal skin to apply it, drive the grit down into the wall. So here's a connection with earth that our ancestors have. As a teenager, I had the opportunity to stand in the caves at Altamira. It forever stays with me. The goddess. Something something in my being knows that a woman stood in that cave and painted that wall. We assume the cave dwellings were occupied by cavemen. I would argue that there were women there. So let's jump again. I want to talk about color alchemy and what exactly it is. I looked

Defining Color Alchemy Within You

SPEAKER_00 20:00

it up on Google, and Google gives anything from interior design to hair dyeing to something that the medieval um uh pre-chemists did to try to turn uh base metals into gold. And I would like to pose a new interpretation for new earth, that color alchemy is something that happens inside yourself when you um feel the emotional uh resonance of color within yourself, and with intention, balance and harmonize your inner being with the color. So think of the sh the wavelength of light that runs through you. There's this river. We just stepped across the river, across the threshold of the crossing painting. Now let's turn the river sideways and run it from the base of the spine out the top of the head, and it is a continuous rainbow of light from red to oranges, through the yellows and the goldens, up into the yellow greens and the blue greens and the vertige and the turquoise, and now we're up into the voice, and then as we come up into the face, we're into the indigos and the cobalt blues, and all of the intuitive senses, those knowings that just happened, you know. I can remember, oh my gosh, 40 years ago, someone was. Walk into my studio and I would already know what they were going to ask for and what they were going to say, but I didn't believe that that was so. And so I would listen to them for an hour of whatever it was, and then they would finally get to the thing that I already knew when they walked in the door. The sense of knowing what you already know and trusting it may take a lifetime to accept, because our culture hasn't been in a place where we accept those knowings as grounded, as tangible and trustworthy. And across now, with this crossing, those knowings, those presence of being are ours. And it's it's okay to it's okay to trust them. Okay, so I didn't just land um here. I want to run through um some stages

Palette Evolution Through Trauma And Healing

SPEAKER_00 23:24

of iteration of my palette development from the time of um planaire painting um when I um completed my color studies in and uh and received my Bachelor of Fine Arts. I started working in pastel. And pastel is is raw pigment made into a crayon. It's a dry stick, and so you can draw with it or you can paint with it. But by paint I don't mean make it wet, it's dry painting. So my pastel palette uh in the late 70s would be hundreds of colors. I would have a four by six foot table all laid out with little finger-sized pastels in a myriad of colors. And so my my color process developed by grabbing the color, like if you could think of all of those colors on the table, all calling to you, like as if they were a room full of kindergarten children, and there's one of them that is saying, Me, me, me, me, pick me, pick me, pick me, the loudest. That's the one I would pick. So my my intuitive sense of which color to start with became um immediate, like shooting from the hip, grab and go. That's a very emotional response, and it doesn't require too much thought. So initially, my process was to draw a white paper, and I would use an earth tone uh pastel, and my drawing would be um outlines of a nature scape, um woodland landscape, and I would draw the outlines, and then I would come back and I would intuitively uh color in, and that's a little bit misleading, I guess, because my technique evolved quickly evolved into a stroking uh nature. So there would be vertical strokes side by side where colors would be juxtaposed, and so you would step back. Uh my papers were large, so um 30 by 40 inches, even though it's a drawing, large size, large-scale papers, and um yeah, so almost tapestry-like in the way they looked like they were woven together. So after a number of years of this, um I gained some recognition with my pastels, they were accepted for some shows, national exhibitions in New York, and whatnot. Um I was at home raising three babies, so I didn't travel too much. I stayed in the studio and I took care of kids. Then the assault happened. And it took me ten years to admit that someone tried to kill me. But the day after I was attacked, I I couldn't paint those pastels the same way anymore. I there were so many emotions that were all screaming to get out at once. It was like the room full of kindergartners, only they were all screaming. The paper was no longer white. I had earth tone paper. Uh, and my my technique for drawing did not involve a preliminary drawing. I was suddenly using earth colors and I was scratching um earthy fields of color. And um I began going out in the landscape, um, and I would always take um someone with me, because quite honestly, I was afraid to be out there by myself, and so I would take my husband with me and um and the children, and so there was a lot of commotion with whatever we were doing in the landscape, but I would be over there scratching these earth colors. And looking back on that, I can I can see now that the the earth colors were a way of regulating my nervous system. So my nervous system was totally out of whack from being traumatized. And it almost doesn't matter what kind of trauma, you know, life-threatening trauma, it took me 10 years to admit that even though the person that hurt me was convicted of attempted murder, it took me 10 years to admit that that that was so. So there was a lot of denial going on, and during that time, what was coming out of my paintings was this um need to feel grounded, to feel safe. And the earth colors provided that. So um expression of all of the emotions that have no words. When we are traumatized by something, no matter what it is, all of uh we can't, there's not words for how we feel about um something so traumatic. I mean, even getting through one day now is there's there's just watching the news is emotional. So we don't have words for all of that, nor should we need words for all of that. We can regulate the nervous system with simple practices of letting the energy out. And so I have developed a process over all these years that I call

Splash Scribble For Nervous System Peace

SPEAKER_00 30:41

splash scribble. And simply the splash is color and the scribble is line. Now this sounds overly simple, but what this does is release the color, okay, so we're releasing some energy from one of the chakras or two of the chakras. So if we said, okay, let's take a small square of paper, six inches square, let's make it small so it's so it's manageable. And we put two colors on there. It doesn't matter which two colors, just the two colors that attract your attention. And we're gonna splash those two colors together. You can use a palette knife, you can use a brush, you can use a pastel, you can use a crayon. It doesn't matter. Put them on there, and while they're wet, grab a dark heavy pencil or a piece of charcoal or a pastel and scribble in it. And when I say scribble, I mean like sign your name and keep going until it stops. The flow will automatically stop when your nervous system hits that moment of peace. So in every painting that I have ever painted, the way I can tell when it's complete is when it's the flow stops, when it feels peaceful, not peaceful, but at peace. So if you stand in front of a painting and you feel tension, then there's something wanting to be expressed. If you stand in front of the painting and you're not feeling the urge or the tension or the frustration or the question, whatever that um spark is. If there's no spark there, I know a lot of people say that that means they lost the inspiration, but that's that's a short-sighted um disconnect. It's not that you lost the inspiration, it's that you arrived at a moment of peace. And peace is momentary, and the only peace, the only place that peace can be created is within yourself. And so I'm a woman on a mission here. Let's create peace one moment at a time. If I have a little bit of peace today, I might find it in the garden, sitting on the bench, stillness, and then the next moment I might start feeling tension, and I might bring that tension in and and scribble on the canvas, and then something's something is at rest. So the energies, the wavelengths of light within us are designed to move. When we clog it all up and just withhold it and withhold it and withhold it, and don't say anything, don't express anything, especially those deep feelings, those deep feelings that don't have words, those are the ones that we really um well, I think what I want to say is that the deeper and the more some some emotions feel like I'm hitting a wall or that they're just gonna eat me alive, those are the ones that have the greatest gold under them. And so I've learned to um paint bigger. When I paint bigger, it it releases bigger tensions, it releases bigger messages from the creatrix, and and greater gifts, so greater sense of knowing and a greater trust of uh the light that's within me, the light with that's within all people. And so now I listen to all people, like the light is within each of us, and each of us has something important to say, something important to experience. Our light matters, and this world needs our light, all of our light.

Our Light Matters Closing Thoughts

SPEAKER_00 35:36

Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you next time.