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Always Getting Carried Away

Digital paintings · 4:5

A big eyed girl with long honey curls in a red dress riding in the basket of a red and white striped hot air balloon that has house windows and a giant eye looking out, surrounded by small balloons and pearly clouds on grey green sky. Signed Magpie 2022.

A girl in a red dress rides in the basket of a red and white striped hot air balloon, and the balloon is a house: shuttered windows open near the top, tiny furnished rooms inside, and one enormous eye looking out through the panes. Around her drift smaller balloons, soft pearly clouds, and a little house hanging from a bunch of grey balloons. She's up there again. A whole life packed into rooms that float, only visible through windows nobody on the ground is looking through. The interior world lifted off, untethered, drifting among other houses and balloons that may or may not have anyone inside them. Below her, the world is small. Up here, she's too big for it. But she didn't mean to leave. She just never figured out how to stay down where things made sense to everyone else.

Made from a poem.

What it costs us, and what most people pay
WhichCosts usMost people pay
fine art print, 8x10 inches$20.00$55.55
fine art print, 16x20 inches$61.00$111.11
fine art print, 24x30 inches$131.00$222.22
the file, to print yourself$0.00$13.13

Pay what you can, from the cost up, in the jewelry box. Or buy the print on Etsy, the file on Etsy.

Closer view of the striped balloon with its shuttered house windows and the girl in the red dress leaning on the basket below.
The hot air balloon girl canvas hung on a white wall above a white mantel crowded with houseplants and small frames.
Close up detail of the open shuttered windows in the balloon: tiny furnished rooms on each side and one enormous eye looking out through the panes.
Close up of the lower left: a small balloon drifting over soft clouds with the Magpie 2022 signature in green script.

Every piece, one page each