Why own an original? This is a particularly challenging question for a professional artist in this day of high-resolution copying. Nowadays you can get a fine copy of an artwork, and contemplating that copy may bring you much satisfaction. But you will still be missing something very important.

Sitting in an audience watching a play is always so much more exciting than seeing that play televised. Being present at a musical concert is another level of experience compared to hearing a recording of that concert. But the pictorial arts (painting, drawing, and such) are not normally taken in as performances, are they? And yet, in a way, they are. And you are one of the performers!

All of the pictorial arts depend on light. Obviously, you cannot see them in the dark. When the light hits the work, it transforms it. If it is an oil painting, for example, the light pierces the translucent colors and continues on down to the layers below. At the semi-opaques, light meets an impasse. And it bounces right back at you off of the full opaques.

Move the illuminating light to different points and you will see a very different painting. Or step back a pace or two, or move closer to the painting, or move even so little as an inch to the right or to the left. The painting will have changed! You are now seeing it from a different vantage point; the light has different effects now. Just as the artist himself did (a thousand times) in painting it in the first place, you too see the painting differently every time you change your position. This is the nature of light and how it washes over the things in the world.

I never fail to be impressed by this when I see an exhibition of works I have been long familiar with. Suddenly these works take on a new life I never suspected. This is why I say that you – the viewer – are one of the performers. You are – I hope – active in contemplating that painting.

With a copy this is all useless. The work of art will not change, no matter your perspective. The luster of chalk, the translucence or oil, the sheen of graphite or silverpoint – none of these will change by as much as one lumen when you move about. But the originals will be alive and, as you contemplate them, ever fresh.

What the artist wanted you to see in his work will only be fully revealed to you in the original.