Let's Keep Dancing

Oil on Canvas // 36x48" Let’s Keep Dancing is painted after a Greek panigíri, a village celebration where music, food, and community intertwine in joy. For me, these festivals are sacred spaces where tradition meets soul. I’ve always said this is my afterlife, a place that holds sound, energy, and the love of being alive. While the panigíri is filled with dancing and laughter, there is also an awareness of impermanence. You feel the pulse of joy and the ache of time passing in the same breath. That contrast, where celebration meets surrender, became the heart of this painting. The title comes from Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?”, a song that turns existential disappointment into defiance. Its chorus, “If that’s all there is, my friends, then let’s keep dancing,” has always mirrored how I see life. I call myself a casual existentialist, aware that life’s biggest moments rarely deliver the transcendence we expect, yet choosing to dance anyway. I began this painting in what I call the dead months, that quiet stretch of winter between New Year’s and spring. I had just moved out of my childhood home and was alone for the first time. In that solitude, I faced every version of myself: the resistance to change, the grief of people and places I had lost, and the small but steady knock of my art asking to be heard. Through painting, I found warmth again. The faces that appeared in this piece, some of people I love now and others I’ve lost, became a way of grieving through love. The panigíri’s circle of dancers became a metaphor for connection, for life’s continuous rhythm of holding on and letting go. Technically, this was my first time painting at this scale and my first time painting people. I approached it like an architect, sketching meticulously to feel safe, building the scene from background to foreground, from structure to human. There were days I wanted to give up, when proportions went wrong and doubt grew loud, but discipline taught me how to turn that voice into a cheerleader. I learned to loosen my hand, to let the figures blur and breathe, to let the painting teach me how to surrender. Oil and I have a complicated relationship. It is a medium that demands patience; it dries on its own schedule, not mine. But its depth, its color, and its texture are where the soul lives. I used deep ultramarine blues against warm underpaintings, golden lights against shadowed architecture, to create both movement and stillness, the coexistence of joy and impermanence. At its core, Let’s Keep Dancing is about acceptance of life’s fleetingness, of ourselves, and of each other. It is about compassion and optimism, about remembering that you do not dance when you are standing still. If this painting could speak, I hope it would say, “Come dance.” Because that is life: we must keep moving, letting go, and meeting joy wherever it finds us. And if that’s all there is, my friends, then let’s keep dancing.