Creating a world with healing color and heart

The Crossing

I've invested fifty years in experimenting with emotional color, how it works, and how to regulate my nervous system and heal from trauma. 

A painting called The Crossing showed me how to teach others the two-step co-creative partnership with nature. 

In the painting, we invert the long-held notion of 'coloring inside the lines.' Instead we spalsh emotional colors. This releases the heart's emotional intelligence.

Then we gound the energy, by scribbling. From these linear structures we support the heart.

IN THE VIDEO Dorothy Fagan speaks from her studio during the pandemic as "The Crossing" emerges in different kind of painting session. As sunlight and shadows cast patterns on her canvas from the woodlands outside her studio she engages in a direct conversation with the creator that directs the flow of the work itself. 

>WATCH THE PAINTING EMERGE Toward the end of the video, you'll see her paint all eight canvases on the floor. 

Embodying the Watershed

Decades pass as I use my art to heal. Trauma isolated me from fellow contemporary artists and I found sanctuary painting a narrow strip of sand between earth and sky.

We moved out of Norfolk to a cottage on a woodland pond, footsteps from the mouth of the Piankatank River, where it flows into Hills Bay and the Chesapeake. The pond beside my studio became a reflection, mirroring life back to me.

I feel my pond as a vortex for all the energies that were coverging within me. I planted a meadow garden beside the pond, and began cultivating my heartland. My heartland meadow grows more vibrant within, than the drought-stressed one outside my window.

Always drawn to water, I feel movement in my body as I scribble effervescence into earthy toned ground.

Beginning near the source in the 1980s, I painted in the mountains of Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York. I hiked, and camped, and painted, from trickling creeks embedded with sea fossils to gushing waterfalls.

Finding light in Darkness

After the assault, after Mom passed, after the divorce, I found myself in a very dark place. I gave all my paintings away, 

To stop being an artist, the silence was deafening. No clients. No friends. No identity. I disappeared and what happened in the darkness changed everything.

My dreams became vivid and lucid. I saw my mother., sparks of light in the dark bathroom in the middle of the night. I struggled to understand what I was experiencing. And slowly, I began journaling. 

I gave Faith the pen and let her speak without interruption. Then I let Will have his turn writing though me. As I mediated the two created a tentative peace in my heart.

In time, the light I found in the darkness grew brighter. I began painting again. With a reversed perspective, I painted en plein air regulating my nervous system with healing colors of earth sky and water. I found harmony with sunrise and sunset, and peace within.

Studio by the pond

Dorothy Fagan paints in her Virginia studio, footsteps from the Chesapeake Bay — natural light from the east, south, and west. Three oversize easels, two painting tables for flat work, and a palette on wheels moves with her flow about the room. 

Her pond and meadow garden mirror her artistry, in an ongoing interchange with creative flow. Zipper, her studio garden companion always at her side.

Back Dorr

Dorothy welcomes visitors, in person and virtual, by appointment. Schedule a studio visit with Dorothy Fagan below.