Color Is a Language. Here Is What It Is Saying.

Color is not decoration. It is information. Your nervous system has been reading it since before you had words for any of it.

Scientists have documented this in peer-reviewed research. A study published in Royal Society Open Science exposed participants to red and blue environments and measured the physiological results. Red increased heart rate and skin conductance, signals of heightened arousal. Blue did the opposite. A broader review synthesizing 72 studies published between 1990 and 2025 confirmed the pattern: warmer colors elevate cardiovascular activity and cortisol secretion, while cooler colors like blue and green activate calming pathways and lower blood pressure. Your body is responding to color before your conscious mind has formed an opinion about it. (Royal Society Open Science, 2023)

This is one of the reasons I limit red in my paintings. Not because I dislike it, but because what I am building is not an excitable world. The cosmos I paint is vast and still and ancient. It asks something of the viewer that red actively works against. The colors I reach for most, deep violet, indigo, teal, gold, the blue-black of deep space, are not arbitrary. They lend themselves to the story of the Otherworlds I am creating, where the guides live and where something is always about to be revealed.

Last month I went on a side quest. I painted a series of 5x7 galaxy sample paintings in oil, purely to play with color theory and see more options for future work. Not finished pieces. Not paintings intended to go anywhere. Just color, moving across a surface, showing me what was possible. It taught me more in an afternoon than I expected. Color behaves differently in oil than it does in any other medium, and the only way to know what a combination will do is to put it down and look at it. The samples live in the studio now. I consult them.

This is not a new idea. Humans have been studying the relationship between color and the human body for thousands of years, and long before the peer-reviewed studies arrived, an ancient tradition had already mapped it.

The chakra system, rooted in Vedic traditions dating back over three thousand years, organizes the energy centers of the body as a sequence of colors moving from the base of the spine to the crown of the head. Each color is assigned to match the vibration of a particular energy center, and each one carries specific meaning for the mind, body, and spirit. What is striking, when you place this system next to modern color psychology, is how closely the two align. They arrived at similar conclusions through entirely different routes and across thousands of years of separation. (Mindvalley)

They say that science is just magic that has not been explained yet. Looking at these two systems side by side, I find that easy to believe.

Here is what the chakra color system holds:

• Red: root chakra. Survival, grounding, primal energy.
• Orange: sacral chakra. Creativity, emotion, pleasure.
• Yellow: solar plexus chakra. Confidence, will, clarity.
• Green: heart chakra. Love, compassion, balance.
• Blue: throat chakra. Truth, expression, communication.
• Indigo: brow chakra. Intuition, inner knowing, vision.
• Violet: crown chakra. Divine connection, transcendence, unity.

Look at that sequence and then look at the night sky. The cosmos moves from the warm heat of stars and nebulae at their cores to the deep indigo and violet of the outer reaches. The universe organizes itself in the same colors that ancient traditions mapped onto human consciousness.

I do not think that is a coincidence either.