Some paintings are made with technique. Some paintings are made with discipline. And then there are paintings that are made with love.

Dancing With Delight belongs to the last category.

When I began it, I had no idea where it was leading me. Like so many paintings in this series, it began with uncertainty. I had already layered colours over several days. The composition felt heavy. It lacked joy. It lacked that unmistakable feeling that the painting itself was breathing.

For a moment, I considered abandoning it.

Instead, I remembered something that has become one of the great lessons of both art and life. Light rarely arrives all at once.

It is layered.

It is risked.

It is trusted.

So I did something that felt completely counterintuitive. Rather than trying to fix details, I flooded the central area with translucent washes of Hansa Yellow, touches of Primary Yellow, hints of Phthalo Blue Light, and delicate veils of luminous green. At first it looked far too strong. Every instinct wanted to wipe it away.

Instead, I waited.

As the glaze settled, something extraordinary happened. The painting seemed to awaken from within. The darkness that had frustrated me suddenly became necessary. It was no longer competing with the light. It was holding it.

Leonardo da Vinci understood this five hundred years ago. “Always begin upon a dark ground,” he advised, because it is darkness that allows light to reveal its full splendour.

Nature has always known this. Stand beneath a rainforest canopy and notice how sunlight never simply illuminates. It dances. It slips through leaves, skips across branches, scatters over moss, flashes for only a heartbeat before disappearing again. The forest is not static. It is a living choreography of shadow and radiance.

That was what I wanted to paint.

Not trees.

Not leaves.

Not even light itself.

I wanted to paint delight.

The greatest surprise came after the painting was finished.

A beautiful woman, originally from Ecuador and now making her life in Panama, visited my home. We often see her dancing as she exercises in the swimming pool, bringing joy wherever she goes. When I invited her to choose one of my paintings, she immediately chose Dancing With Delight. She smiled and told me it was partly because purple is her favourite colour.

As I placed the painting in her hands, I realised it had found exactly the person it had been waiting for.

Some paintings don’t simply find collectors.

They find kindred spirits.

And perhaps that is the greatest delight of all.