Marie Webb’s art show is called Magic in Her Hands.
It’s something she said once about one of her drawings — a self portrait with mystical swirls upon her palms.
But it could have just as easily been named the incredible lightness of being. Hers. And the purple, red, blue, green, black, gold; iridescent, infinite colours of her imagination.
A world of stars, hearts and diamonds in the sky. Beyonce and the Virgin Mary. Fashion and the Backstreet Boys.
Her dad, her mom, herself. Unvarnished, uninhibited, as joyful and original as the young woman who bounds into the room with a lip-glossed smile, hugs and bursts of words that aren’t always easy to understand.  “Effervescent,” her father and fellow artist, Nick Webb, calls his 23-year-old daughter, who has the chromosomal disorder Down syndrome.
“Happy, constantly,” he says smiling, sitting in the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, where a major exhibit of Marie’s work has its opening reception at 7 p.m. tonight.
“Never down, always up. It’s up syndrome.”
“I love it,” his daughter enthuses moments later, arms open wide, seeing her pictures framed and mounted for the first time.
“Can I buy them all?” her dad jokes. She slaps him playfully on the stomach and giggles before showing visitors her work, just a fraction of the “hundreds and hundreds” of pieces her father and mother — fellow artist-educator Renee Forrestall, the daughter of famed Nova Scotia painter Tom Forrestall — say fill their Halifax home. She’s always been this way and she’s almost always painted, drawn or scribbled, with charcoal, markers or paints. Starting at two months old, Webb says, and ever since.
It’s something they’ve encouraged and watched flourish into the striking, textured, layered pieces Dale Sheppard, the gallery’s curator of education and public programs, calls “exciting work that needs to be seen.”
The work of Down syndrome artists is rarely seen in such mainstream galleries, she says. But while the condition is part of Marie’s story, it’s not the reason for the exhibit. “Her work stood on its own,” Sheppard says. Her work has a method of its own, a purity her father says isn’t bound by time, envy or convention. Like her piece, Nutcracker Christmas Barbies, an enchanting blend of her love for the ballet and the dolls, which she used to trace the forms — five of them facing forward, one hovering above. Or her piece, Me, another self-portrait wedged sideways in the middle of the paper as though flying out of the frame.
Like a “butterfly” she says.
Or the princess amid snowflakes and diamond stars.
“I like princesses,” she says.

Or the grand, ethereal-looking Mary, with the tiny baby Jesus in her stomach.
“I pray, I pray to Jesus. Happy Birthday Jesus.”
The simplicity of her words cuts to the core of her thoughts, just as her art is unencumbered.
“A pure expression of joy and celebration,” says her mom, who like her dad, teaches art at NSCAD University and formed the art group Team Possibles for young adults with Down syndrome.
“She’s so immediate and direct with her marks and with her gesture and her colour that I think it would inspire people to think of their own mark, making, their own drawing skills, and realize there’s nothing to be afraid of when you put pen to paper and that what’s nice is when you see Marie in action, too, the way she draws, the method that she uses, the approach. There is no hesitation. She rarely goes at something with a pencil and then draws over it or practises.
“Everything is now, it’s in the here and now, and it’s important now and every mark is significant now and as it goes down, it’s perfect.”
It’s a simplicity Nick Webb says the perpetually smiling Marie — black blouse chicly covering a One Direction T-shirt, gauzy scarf wrapped bohemian-style around her waist — brings to his own life.
“A simplicity that I think for most of us gets harder to keep,” he says. “We’re so busy being ambitious looking to where we’re going and what Marie shows everybody is you’re fine where you are.
“Even going home in the evening you know. … You get back and you’re worried, how am I going to do this and then you see Marie — nothing matters except for the fact you’re back and I’m here and where’s dinner.”
And of course creating art, which her father says Marie spends “hours and hours” doing daily, often with “thousands” of markers by her side.
“Painting and drawing is an amazing art — amazing,” she says, taking in the work that makes her father feel “mystified,” “thankful.”
And her mother “very proud.”
Hearing this, Marie smiles, moves her own hands back and forth over her chest.
“Beating heart” she says.
“It’s all love,” her mom laughs. “All love,” she repeats, laughing back.